Island on the Edge Read online

  3.What ambitions do I have? I’m assistant studio manager in a moderately successful advertising agency at the moment; do I want, or am I cut out to be any higher up the promotional ladder? Answer: No to both questions.

  4.Is there anyone in my life who will be negatively affected by this plan? Answer: I don’t think so. My brother is married and living with his family in Zimbabwe. My sister, not too far away, is also married with a young family and both my parents (who would have been horrified at this plan) are dead. There is no serious relationship in my life, and not likely to be as far as I can see.

  5.If I pass by this opportunity, how would I feel? Answer: very disappointed in myself. I will wonder for the rest of my life what I might have missed.

  Reasons Against:

  1.How will I earn a living? Answer: I have no idea! Paint pretty pictures? Ha ha!

  2.How do I buy the property? Answer: I’ll have to sell the house.

  3.Do you want to sell this house? Answer: Not really.

  4.If you do sell, will you have enough to buy the property, cover your mortgage and pay off a solicitor, plus a little left over to live on while you find out how to make some money? Answer: I think so, but not sure.

  The list ended up pretty even. I looked at it for a couple of days and decided I would have to risk it. A part of me had already made up my mind the moment I set foot on Soay.

  A few days later I found myself telephoning the estate agency. I told them I wanted to put in an offer for Glenfield House. They told me Scottish law differed from English law so I would need a Scottish solicitor and recommended a solicitor’s partnership based in Inverness. At that point I realised I needed to slow down a bit and think this through a little more carefully. I couldn’t put in an offer without the money to back it up. I asked a local estate agent to value my house and discovered it had risen significantly in value since I had bought it three years earlier. If I could sell it for the price quoted I should just about be able to do it, I thought. I then took a crazy gamble. I heard from the Skye agents that someone else was interested and the closing date for offers was just a week away. So, before I had time to put my own house on the market, I called the Inverness solicitors and instructed them to send in my offer. It was reckless and stupid and the extremely dour Scottish solicitor appointed to represent me made it very clear that if my offer were accepted it would be legally binding. He did not disguise the fact that he thought me completely irresponsible. And what was I planning to do on Soay? The only hint of an idea I’d had was that I would like to ‘paint’. I incautiously told him that. There was silence at the other end of the line. I could imagine the mingled amusement and contempt on his face. He was right of course. His main concern was not my future wellbeing, but whether I was completely nuts, and penniless. I must have sounded like a child to him. Now, of course, I can see how it would have meant all sorts of problems for both the solicitor and myself if I couldn’t produce the cash to buy the property. At the time I just thought it would all work out, and he was being rude.

  I was very, very fortunate. One afternoon at work, I got a telephone call from Inverness to say my offer had been accepted. Now there really was no time to waste. I immediately got on the phone to my estate agency and instructed them to put my house on the market ASAP. By the time I got home that night there was a ‘For Sale’ sign in my front garden. I burst into tears when I saw it. Here was the undeniable sign that I had just made a huge commitment. It felt unreal and extremely scary. But, still, I carried on.

  By the end of that week I had buyers who offered the full asking price for my cottage. I instructed my English solicitor to deal with the buyers, my building society and the Scottish solicitor. It suddenly dawned on me that the legal fees would be twice as much as I had originally calculated. Hmm.

  Now I had to tell friends, family and work colleagues what I had done: I was buying a house on an island at the other end of the country and would be moving there for good very soon. Reactions were mixed; some thought it was really exciting, but most suspected I had either completely flipped, or was running away from ‘The Real World’. The hardest person to tell was my sister Jan. She definitely thought I was crazy and I think she was probably right. It was inexplicable. Yet, even though I was finding the whole experience terrifying and stressful, I kept going with plans for the sale and the move. I finally handed in my notice just before Christmas. Only two months after seeing that photograph of Glenfield House in the Portree Estate Agency window, I had completely dismantled my life.

  Interestingly, the Berlin Wall had fallen at around the time I was making my decision to ‘buck the system’. That was the end of the Cold War, the symbolic downfall of communism. I remember being profoundly moved by the joy and elation on the faces of the people as they swarmed over the rubble to embrace their comrades on the other side. I felt I had just started to destroy my own dividing wall, though I had no idea what I was going to find when I finally climbed through it.

  The sale of my property went through in February 1990. By now I was renting a small room in Woking and taking freelance work from the agency I used to work for. I wasn’t exactly homeless, but my furniture was. I telephoned John Gilbertson to find out how to get my furniture over to my new home. He explained diplomatically that it would be impossible to get my furniture to Soay in February. The weather was too unpredictable and the days were still very short. It would be best to wait until the spring.

  What to do with my furniture? I decided to get it as close to Soay as possible. I hired the biggest lorry my license would allow and friends and family helped me load it. The trickiest piece was my precious upright piano; it needed at least four people to move it. By the time we finished the lorry was stacked to the roof and the suspension looked seriously over-burdened. I had inherited a lot of books from my mother’s house and I imagined I would have time to read them all. There were boxes and boxes of them. I had tried to find out if there were any storage places on Skye, but to no avail, so I went up on spec, trusting to luck.

  The Isle of Skye in the early 1990s was a little more remote than it is today. There was no bridge, only a ferry from Kyle of Lochalsh to Broadford that stopped running about 6.00pm.

  After a twelve-hour drive I managed to catch the last ferry and drove through Broadford in the dark looking for a place to stay with a parking space big enough for the lorry. Just north of Broadford I saw a B&B sign that looked promising. A steep drive led to an ample parking area and there were plenty of rooms available in February. The couple who ran the B&B were very nice. I explained I was moving to Soay in the spring, but needed somewhere to store my belongings. They knew of Soay but had assumed that it was uninhabited, so were intrigued to know more about it. I told them all I knew, which wasn’t much. They suggested some people who might be able to store my furniture for a few months. Unfortunately none could so by late afternoon next day I was coming to the conclusion that I would be driving my entire household belongings back south. I had only hired the lorry for four days. Amazingly, my B&B landlady had a solution. She was looking after an empty house for a neighbour who had recently got married and moved all her furniture to her husband’s house. They had just returned from their honeymoon and when the B&B lady telephoned to ask if they would store my furniture the new bride said yes, it would be better if her house had the furniture, ‘for the look of it’. So that afternoon, this very obliging couple helped me move my belongings into the empty house just down the road. The lady at the B&B even offered to keep my piano at her own house – she had a piano of her own and she worried mine would get damp. In return for all this kindness we agreed that I would I paint a watercolour of their home. The three of us heaved and shoved my piano into the B&B.

  Next morning I drove the miraculously empty lorry back to Woking. There was nothing to do now but wait for the completion of the sale. And spring.

  I had no idea how different or difficult life would be without an adequate income. I was used to a good salary with lots of o
vertime pay. I was also feeling the sudden loss of identity. Once you strip away the person you thought you were, who is there to replace it? To bolster my meagre freelance earnings I took what I felt to be an insalubrious job of waitress in the nearby British Aerospace canteen. It was a big blow to my once smug and secure ego.

  For the first time, I was racked with doubts about what I had just done. In those two months before leaving the security of my old life my dreams were full of Glenfield House and Soay. In them, my new home was a dark, dismal, rotting shell, dripping with water and mould and filled with ominous phantoms. I found myself walking across Soay, only to have my progress barred by a riotous motorway filled with nothing but London taxis cutting the island in two. During my barely more rational waking state, I realised I could hardly remember what the house was like inside. I had spent barely ten to fifteen minutes in it, I was not sure I had really taken in the true condition of the property. Perhaps my sub conscious knew the truth?

  It was too late to go back. Whatever my doubts, when spring finally arrived there was nothing to stop me going to my new home. Except myself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Arrival

  May 1990

  It was a beautiful day in early May when I arrived back on Skye along with my now elderly dog Taffy. He was tired after the long journey and I was sure he would hate the boat trip to Soay. But the sun was shining on the Guiding Light waiting for us at Elgol jetty. It seemed a good sign. My little 2CV was crammed with pots and pans, plates, cutlery and clothes in poly bags. I had grabbed everything I thought necessary for basic living from my belongings in the empty house. The car was ready to scrape the ground by the time I finished and I had to let the canvas roof down to fit it all in. Once again, I had asked John Gilbertson if he would give me a lift over to Soay. Even I realised this would have to be the last time; Glenfield House was now my property and he had absolutely no obligation to be my ferryman. However, as usual he was very helpful. I loaded everything from the car onto John’s boat and we set off for Soay. As we approached the island, the churning in my stomach was a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

  I did not notice them until we were rowing toward the beach. But there, stretching along the shore was a line of people waiting to meet me. I think it was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I had never expected this sort of welcome. Perhaps it seems odd but at this stage I still knew virtually nothing about the other seventeen residents of the island, apart from a few names which I had barely taken in on my brief first visit. I had found no published information apart from an Ordnance Survey map. In all my dreams I had never imagined anything like this. I was getting my first glimpse of real life on Soay and for the first time I realised this was not just a magical island for my adventures. I was coming to join a community of real people. Nearly everyone who was not at sea fishing had come to help carry my belongings up to the house. Mercifully, there wasn’t too much stuff – just a fraction of the rest of my household possessions waiting to come over from Skye.

  When I walked into Glenfield House there was another surprise. Someone had turned the house into a living home. The Rayburn was lit, there were rugs on the floor and wild flowers in a jug on the kitchen table. The transformation was incredible.

  After helping me in with my bags, my new neighbours discreetly left to get on with their own chores. However, two of them stayed behind to give me invaluable advice. First, David Rosie (I discovered he was a former mainland school teacher, now island fisherman and artist, but more of that later). David kindly showed me how to use the paraffin lamps scattered throughout the house. That was a great service. I had never seen an Aladdin lamp in my life before and they require a certain amount of sympathetic maintenance to make sure evenings are not spent in smoky darkness or potential danger from fire. Once I learnt the art of wick trimming I found them a pleasant, homely light and they also pumped out a significant amount of heat, a real bonus in winter, though as this was early summer I quickly realised I wouldn’t have much use of the oil lamps for some months. This far north, the sun hardly seems to set between May and August.

  Next: a quick lesson in essential island communications. This was provided by Anne Smith, who lived in the schoolhouse (I’m sure it was Anne who had brought my new home to life). I began to understand that the shopping, mail deliveries and telephone calls I took for granted on the mainland all required careful co-ordination on an island.

  Anne explained that the mailboat called once a month – every third Thursday in the month, to be exact. The Royal Mail contract to deliver Isle of Soay post was held then, as now, by the Sheerwater. In those days she was a graceful, World War Two, ex-motor torpedo boat that worked out of Arisaig as a privately run ferryboat, servicing all the small isles. (A newer Sheerwater still runs the same service today.) She was also the island’s main supply boat bringing bottled gas and paraffin, animal feed and, of course, human food supplies. I would discover that Mr Fleming ran a very good shop in Arisaig supplying everything islanders might need – from Wellington boots or new broom heads, to sacks of potatoes, shampoo and dog wormer.

  Shopping, I learned, meant ringing the store three or four days before the next mailboat, reading a list over the crackling radio telephone, and then hoping and praying nothing had been forgotten – it would be at least four weeks until the next boat and that was if the weather was good enough. (I would also learn how much we owed to the thoughtful crew; if weather was poor on the Thursday they were due to arrive, skipper Ronnie Dyer always endeavoured to make the trip on the next available good day. The longest wait I can remember was around six weeks.)

  Even fine weather did not mean an easy life. As Anne explained, an inventive system had evolved for getting supplies and mail from the Sheerwater to the shore. Her husband Gordon (he was Soay’s schoolteacher) had a well-maintained aluminium assault craft, which had been an ex-military or navy boat used for various purposes such as beach landings. (These boats could be linked together across a river to form floating bridges strong enough to carry a tank.) Flat-bottomed and broad in the beam, it was a very versatile craft, ideal for conditions on Soay. On mailboat day Gordon would motor off in his assault craft and come alongside the Sheerwater, hanging off at a fair distance out in the bay. He returned loaded up with our mail and supplies, dropping off individual packages (or ‘messages’ as they are called in Scotland) to members of each household waiting along the shoreline.

  This worked very well, I would discover. However, I also discovered, it always, always seemed to be dead low tide on mailboat day so it was a long, slippery and awkward, not to say dangerous, journey climbing over slimy, weed-clad rocks with boxes of groceries, a full 15kg Calor gas bottle and 25 litres of paraffin!

  Once the mailbag had been sorted at the school, Anne or Gordon would deliver the post to each house. No house had a letterbox, so letters were either left just inside the front door or in a plastic bag on the door handle. Technically, Anne added, it would be another month before a letter could be sent or replied to, but, again, they had thought of an enterprising way around that. Gordon had an old blue Transit van parked in the (then) tiny parking area above the old concrete jetty at Elgol. The helpful and obliging local postman, the well-named Nigel Nice, would pick up mail from the back of the van and sometimes deliver mail there too. When a Soay fishing boat was at Elgol offloading its catch, somebody could drop off or pick up mail. Gordon’s van was never locked, but this was no problem. In those days Elgol was a much quieter place; all the locals knew the blue Transit van was the Soay postbox.

  Internal island communication was another complexity that needed to be explained to me. The telephone system was rudimentary but serviceable in 1990. It was a solar powered radiotelephone, the first ever solar-charged telephone service in the world, I believe. A single, but very large, solar panel was installed in the early 1970s by the Post Office (back then they ran all telecommunications throughout the British Isles). It was such an innovation at the time that th
e actress Joanna Lumley was flown in by helicopter for the official opening.

  I also had to learn that there were only two lines for outward communication on the island; one was from the public telephone box (painted bright red). This line also linked to Soay House (I would soon meet the owners, Tex and Jeanne Geddes). The second line serviced all the other properties. Each house had its own dial-up telephone, but only one household could make an outgoing call at a time. If you picked up the phone and heard a screeching noise, the telephone was in use and the call scrambled. There were some difficulties about phone usage, you had to be careful not to hog the line, and not long after receiving these strict instructions on telephone etiquette I became an the unwitting offender. But that’s a tale for later.

  Back to my first day . . . I had a question of my own: ‘What do we do with rubbish?’ Anne explained that she and Gordon took theirs off the island by boat to dispose of it in Broadford and she offered to take mine too. There was nowhere nearer, not for Soay residents.

  Then Anne and David left and I was alone for the first time in my new home. There was enough furniture in the house to make a fairly acceptable start; there was even a rather luxurious king sized bed in the bedroom above the kitchen. There were also three cast-iron single beds in the other two bedrooms. Not the aesthetically pleasing Victorian types, but old ex-army foldaway beds, with foam mattresses.

  Taffy was exploring too. Once he had recovered from the boat trip and, even worse, the horrors of a rubber dinghy (he had never been keen on water) he soon regained his usual equilibrium and wandered around looking for somewhere to settle. In the world we had left behind, Taffy had his own armchair, a gift from my aunt who took care of him until I found a house of my own. Until his chair arrived I made up a temporary bed for him by the Rayburn with some old blankets I had brought for the purpose. He accepted this alternative immediately because he was tired, but I knew Taffy would not view Glenfield House as home until he was reunited with his chair.