Island on the Edge Read online

  We came to the house and went inside. The property had been kept clean and there were signs of recent maintenance, but it had obviously not been lived in for some time. There were still a few pieces of furniture left in the rooms. I hardly knew what my thoughts about the house were. Had it been anywhere on the mainland, I may not have considered it but it was in a place I never thought could exist outside my imagination. The mountains loomed over the island (for a short time I thought the Cuillins were a part of Soay) in a comforting way, giving it boundary and stature. There were little copses of trees surrounding the property and no sounds except the murmur of running water and a quiet clamour of seabirds in the distance. John showed me around and answered my questions, which weren’t many. When I looked in at the bathroom, I noticed that the bath enamel had been stained brown by the peaty water. ‘I’ll have to get a new bath when I move here,’ I thought. This was the first time I had been aware of my own thought processes. This seemed to be more than ‘just a look’ then. I wished I’d told myself before.

  I shall never forget leaving the island and watching the house grow smaller and smaller until it merged into the green-grey of the low hill behind it. The idea of never coming back was already unbearable, unthinkable. From that first visit, once I had set foot on Soay the house no longer became my primary obsession, but merely a means to an end. I had never experienced a place like it in my life. After only ten minutes on the island I had fallen under its unfathomable, magical and enthralling spell. Unbelievably, I had found my longed for childhood ‘middle of nowhere’ and apparently, completely by accident.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Luton interlude

  I was born at home, the youngest of Ken and Pat Pacey’s three children, in November 1961. My sister always took great delight in telling me that I was an ‘accident’. I presume she picked up this gem of information from an indiscreet scrap of adult conversation. Family folklore has it that at the time of my birth, both Dad and the midwife were too absorbed in watching Doctor Kildare on our black and white telly downstairs to realise that Mum was going through the last stages of labour in the bedroom upstairs. I was delivered still inside the unbroken foetal sack like a defrosted pre-packed chicken. Apparently, this means that I will never drown at sea. I was always very proud of this singular blessing and so far it seems to be serving me well.

  Home was a very ordinary semi-detached house, in the middle of a very ordinary late 1950s Wimpey housing estate in Luton. Our house sat at the bottom of one of those motorway embankments carrying the M1 on its long, straight journey between London and the North. A steep grassy slope rose several metres above the rooftops of the houses in my road and at the top, passing out of sight in each direction, was a line of tall neon-bright streetlights. They were planted like double-headed Triffids along the central barrier and their light gave the sky a perpetual dull orange-yellow glow. There was no such thing as night-time in my street. As children we could play outside at anytime of the evening; almost like daytime but devoid of colour and our bodies cast eerie double shadows across the pavements. I can still conjure up, as if it were yesterday, those cold, still winter nights when we played in the ‘dark’. On foggy evenings, which occurred fairly often as Luton wallows at the bottom of an extinct prehistoric lake, a cocktail of sulphurous carbon monoxide and fumes from the nearby Whitbread brewery wafted over the estate, as if rotten scrambled egg had been plopped into a flat pint of beer.

  Even so, I had a happy childhood, growing up in a secure and stable environment both at home and within our ‘new’ housing estate. The people in my neighbourhood had all moved into the area at the same time and most of them had experienced the war years and the austerity that followed. In the colourful, psychedelic sixties, optimism for the future and growing prosperity generated a kind of ‘village’ or ‘family’ atmosphere around us. We all addressed our neighbours as auntie or uncle, less formal than Mr or Mrs but still a respectful title for a child to use. It was quite usual for mothers to simply be ‘housewives’ and not go out to work and I think this created a very safe environment. There was always somebody’s mother around to keep an eye on us and there was lots of socialising: daily coffee mornings, informal weekend parties and a mêlée of adults and children in and out of each other’s homes at Christmas.

  There were plenty of children of my own age to play with, not only in each other’s gardens but in our road, a safe cul-de-sac with all the nearby houses facing in on each other around a large, grassy roundabout that we exploited all the time. (I used to think that the roundabout was enormous, but on a nostalgic visit to my old home some years ago it seemed absolutely tiny.) We called it ‘the island’ but it could be a fort, an arid desert where we searched desperately for a watered oasis, or a deserted island that we had managed to swim to from the wreck on the opposite pavement.

  Then there was ‘The Dumps’, a piece of wasteland belonging to the local council. It had been earmarked for development for the expanding Luton and Dunstable hospital, but left to run fallow. Eight-foot high chain-link fencing was no barrier to the curious and bold opportunist. Once, it must have been prime agricultural land producing wheat or barley but by our time it had become waste ground; churned up, bulldozed, trenched and then left alone to grow a riot of scrub and brambles that covered the uneven ground. It was a haven for children and fly tippers alike; the very best place to find wheels and discarded bits of wood for building go-carts. Old pram wheels were the most prized find – in those days pram tyres were solid rubber and almost indestructible. My brother Mark made the best go-carts in the neighbourhood. My sister Janet painted exotic designs on them using bright colours from leftover paint tins and even gold paint when she could salvage any. My contribution was usually just getting in the way and irritating the pair of them. The Dumps was also an excellent place to make dens out of discarded pallets and corrugated tin, hidden in secret places inside trenches and thick bushes. These were often furnished with old car seats and blown settees for extra comfort. In this undergrowth we became primitive tribes, fighting territory wars with kids from other roads who had dared to come into ‘our area’. Hair pulling, name-calling, mud throwing, booby traps and trip ropes were possibly the worst of our crimes. We had a freedom to roam and play that is probably unknown to the urban child of today.

  It was the era of the Vietnam War, IRA bombings and bomb scares. It was also a time of national strikes, power cuts and the three-day-week. The long waiting list for party-line telephones to be installed into private homes by the Post Office dominated our lives. But the space age had dawned. In 1969 I remember being allowed to stay up to see Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

  As the standard of living rose across Britain, the average family was able to afford a car and of course nearly everyone wanted one. Car manufacturing was a thriving industry through the sixties and seventies. Luton was fairly affluent and growing fast. Vauxhall Motors was the biggest employer in Luton and nearly everyone either worked at the factory or in a business connected to it. My father was a metallurgist working in the laboratory there.

  At the girls’ high school I attended, I was pretty much a ‘go with the flow’ pupil. I stuck to the rules and generally behaved. I was never given detention, or sent to the head mistress to be given the dreaded ‘slipper’. (I must admit to being curious to know what the slipper looked like. Could it have been a tartan one or was it pink and fluffy?) I found school a bit dull but I was interested in Art, English and History and seemed to have an aptitude for Human Biology, which helped. Unfortunately the school leaned heavily toward mathematics and the sciences. I seriously struggled with maths, which also affected my abilities in physics and chemistry, subjects my Dad was keen we should all be as adept at as he was.

  My happy childhood was disturbed by two major blows. When I was about eight years old, Mum became seriously ill and spent several months in hospital suffering from almost total organ collapse, due in the main to being a chain smoker. After several months
she returned home and for a while, with Dad’s help, life almost returned to normal, but she was never really fit again and survived on a cocktail of medication and inhalers for the rest of her life. However, Mum was far too tough to allow her infirmities to get in the way. She was a totally fearless, boyish and diminutive five-foot-one redhead with a voice like a sergeant major and the vernacular to match it, if roused. She could browbeat apparently implacable six-foot policemen and single-handedly face down an aggressive, potentially violent mob of youths, leaving them shamed and apologetic. I know . . . I was witness to it.

  Dad was about six-foot-two with dark hair and blue eyes, and when I was old enough to think of making comparisons with other fathers in the road, I thought him quite good-looking in a Donald Sindon (an English actor from the forties and fifties), sort of way. Each one of us has a very different memory of our Dad and mine is firmly fixed within the confines of my childhood and early teens. He was not one for frivolous conversation and was old fashioned in both his dress and attitude. I never saw him in anything other than a suit. For work he wore a dark suit with well-shined shoes. For fishing he wore a tweedy jacket and flat cap, and for gardening and DIY he wore . . . an old suit. I don’t ever remember him wearing anything less formal. Dad was very much the urban man. He used Brylcreem on his hair just as he had done in his RAF days. He still used old wartime RAF idioms too such as ‘gubbins’, a universal term for any kind of fluid other than water.

  Yet Dad was very progressive in other ways. He expected all three of us to be competent in practical matters such as wiring a plug, testing a fuse or changing a light bulb. He made sure we knew how to use a screwdriver, a paintbrush and a hammer. He encouraged us to have our own interests and was always happy to share his – as long as we didn’t talk too much.

  From an early age I saw right through Dad’s attempts at being the Victorian father. He crumpled at the first signs of a trembling lip and I shamelessly exploited his weakness. Dad was quick to anger but just as quick to forgive and forget (such as the time I used his cut-throat razor to sharpen my pencil crayons). We dubbed him ‘Captain Bligh’ (behind his back) after he acquired a four-man Heron class sailing boat, built by my uncle, and he tried to teach us how to sail it with him.

  Then came the second blow. Jan had married and moved not too far away with her husband. Mark was working, apprenticed to be an electrician and on day release to college, and I had just begun my teens at high school. Unexpectedly, one Saturday morning, my father died from a massive heart attack while doing what he loved best, fishing by the riverbank. He was with my sister Jan at the time. They were particularly close. I never really got to know him intimately other than in the role of my dad. He too was a heavy smoker like many of his generation.

  The comfortable existence that I had been used to didn’t quite vanish overnight, but with only a widow’s pension and a small pension from Vauxhall to live on, it was a struggle both financially and physically for Mum to run the home. First Dad’s company car was returned, then our sailing boat, and the static caravan in Dorset had to go.

  Mum never really got over Dad’s death; I knew that very well even though she didn’t show it. Both my parents were undemonstrative and recoiled with embarrassment from shows of emotion. They came from a ‘stiff-upper-lip’ generation, so my mother never expressed herself outwardly and I learnt to keep my feelings well hidden from her. She coped by making sure that our old routines continued and nothing was allowed to slip. Her sensible and practical way of giving me comfort came in the form of a puppy. Mum knew I had always desperately hankered after a dog but both my parents thought a dog would be too much of a tie. One day she brought home a tiny little Welsh Border Collie pup and we named him Taffy. He was not exactly compensation, but he did achieve the main objective; I focussed on my new puppy and not my enormous and inexpressible sense of loss.

  My thoughts for the future when I left school centred on anything ‘arty’ that might earn me a living. It was now the late seventies. ‘The King’, Elvis Presley, had died in sad and pitiful circumstances in far off America and the Punk era was born in the UK. Flares, Abba and the Bee Gees were out. The Sex Pistols, safety pins and drainpipe trousers were in. I went to a nearby art college to study art and graphic design, hastily taking in my flared jeans to fit in with the other students in my class, although purple Mohican hairdos were never my style.

  I also joined the newly amalgamated girls’ Rangers and boys’ Venture Scouts. For the first time girls and boys were allowed to mix in one scouting unit, particularly on camping expeditions. I made many new friends and it was also my first real experience of ‘roughing it’ outdoors, apart from a few times camping out on night fishing exercises with Dad in old style canvas tents. Night hikes and camping trips with enthusiastic and, more importantly, competent companions added a new dimension to my life within a safe and mutually caring unit of young people. We ‘hung-out’ together on nearly everything we did and the bond between us has stood the test of time.

  After college, once I had started my first job in Luton as a paste-up artist and designer in a fast-print shop in the middle of town, I started to enjoy the advantages of earning a regular income. I became seriously absorbed in trendy clothes, going out with my friends, boyfriends and aiming for more achievable goals, such as owning a car and finding a place of my own. At the age of twenty-one, about a year after I had started work, I left home and moved into a small rented studio flat just a few miles away in Luton. My brother had already left for Africa some years before. He too was looking for adventure and a new life.

  A little over a year later my mother died. She had been on borrowed time for a long while. On a visit to Zimbabwe to see my brother and his soon-to-be wife, she fell seriously ill and lived just long enough to see them married.

  I think that Mark, Jan and I all agree that Mum had decided that her work was done once we became independent and settled, so she simply gave up on life. Such was her nature; she didn’t play by the rules and no one on earth would have had the power to change her mind once she had made it up. We all held her in deep respect. She was exasperating, amusing, reckless and admirable. I don’t think that there was a cryptic crossword she couldn’t solve.

  Life as a mother and housewife did not sit easy with Mum. She once admitted to me that the Second World War was the most exciting time of her life, a time when she felt she was contributing to something important. She was in the WRAF as a radio and Morse code operator and loved to tell me little snippets of her experiences. She spoke of being in a secure bunker near to Inverness where she saw a display of the Northern Lights for the first time. I know that for a while she was stationed at Bletchley because she told me of her first ever visit to Luton (she never divulged what she actually did at Bletchley, I might add). She and a few pals had been given a day’s leave and they decided to take the train into Luton to look for some entertainment. It was Sunday, raining and nothing was open except one cinema showing a film none of them wanted to see. She vowed never to return. Sometime later she was posted to Egypt where she met my Dad and they fell in love. Unfortunately his hometown happened to be Luton . . . such are life’s little ironies. After her death, a kind aunt took in my dog Taffy, until I had found a house of my own.

  To get a job in London was the aim of nearly all my friends and I wanted very much to do the same. It wasn’t long before I started to look in that direction. In 1984 I was accepted as a junior visualiser and graphic artist with Granfield Rourke Collins, a large advertising agency. My new career move brought my material desires closer to being a reality. Even though I only had a very junior position, my salary was already double what I had been earning in Luton. About a year later, Saatchi and Saatchi, now a thriving, government-rewarded business, took over the agency. The buyout of Granfield Rourke Collins meant that Saatchi and Saatchi had become the biggest advertising agency in Britain. New accounts flooded in from prominent businesses and government-run interests. London in the early to mid 1980s seem
ed terribly exciting to me. I was right in the middle of the city in Jermyn Street and only a short walk from the National Gallery and the Royal Academy. I would meet friends after work and we would go out – to eat, to the cinema, theatre or a concert. Outwardly I had everything any young person could wish for. The significance of a nuclear meltdown at a power station near a Russian city called Chernobyl did not have the impact on me that it should have had.

  Eventually I moved to a smaller and younger agency in Westbourne Grove where I was much happier and felt part of a good working team. It was a totally different atmosphere, full of friendly co-operation, goodwill and humour, but there was lots of work and long hours too. I could have lived nearer to my job and moved into London but, even in the 1980s, properties there were prohibitively expensive. London was too claustrophobic for me anyway. The M1 motorway was my only means of obtaining a house in a relatively quiet and affordable location but still within a reasonable commuting distance from work.

  During my brief visit to the Isle of Soay, I experienced only a hint of its languid tranquillity and sweet silences, but to me it was as if a door had firmly shut out Bedlam for a while. I had made my way home haunted by Soay’s peace and beauty and I was desperate to return.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I buy a house on Soay

  October 1989

  Back home from my visit to Soay, I tried to be sensible and look seriously at the pros and cons of buying a simple cottage on a very remote island. I got a piece of paper, drew a line down the middle then wrote Reasons For on the left-hand side, Reasons Against on the right.

  Reasons For:

  1.I’m still young enough to try this, and if it goes wrong, I can start again, go back to work.

  2.What do I want to be doing when I’m 35? Do I still want to be commuting to London, working long hours? Answer: No!