A Traveller's Life (23 page)

On our return to England early in 1964 we faced the now familiar problems of keeping alive while I wrote a book, in this instance
Slowly Down the Ganges
. I was therefore more than happy when Peter Crookston, then of the
Sunday Times
, proposed that I should visit some of the more lonely islands off the coast of Britain and record a way of life that was already in eclipse and which is now, largely, no more. Visiting lonely islands turned out to be an expensive operation, necessitating the hiring of vessels, some of them of quite large tonnage, from their sometimes venal owners, and on more than one occasion Crookston complained plaintively to me and to John Bulmer, a well-known photographer who accompanied me and whose ideas of travel expenses, as a member of Magnum (a well-known photographic agency), were rather grandiose, that we were spending money more quickly than the
Sunday Times
could acquire it.

Winter is the worst season of the year, especially in the Western Isles where surrounded by the sea we are face to face with the worst elements of nature. Here we feel the Winter very lonely and dreary when nothing remains of the beauties of time past. Flowers
have faded away and birds migrated to warmer climates … At times we do not receive mails for ten or fourteen days as no boats will venture across the windswept Sound … Sometimes we go searching for driftwood along the shore and very often we get a great deal. We boys do not feel the night very long at all. We play hide and seek round the houses, or play cards or read books and these all help to pass the time. In Winter we see plenty of geese and sometimes swans on the wing which is a sure sign of snow. But soon Winter will be over and then we are into Spring with its long days and fine weather. Then the boats put out to sea and it is with unpleasant memory we think of Winter.

I found this essay on mildewed paper underneath a heap of thatching grass in an abandoned schoolhouse on the small island of Taransay, off the west coast of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. It was written in the early 1930s by a small boy who lived on the island. His laborious pothooks – heavily annotated by the teacher in red ink: ‘Careless! Cramped! You must improve!' – tell us so much about the splendours and difficulties of island life that, reading them in 1964, with the population of the island down to five, he seemed a prophet of the inevitable.

By the 1960s the communities in the smaller islands of Britain were dying root and branch. Soon, unless the process of depopulation was halted, the only inhabitants would be sheep, Atlantic seals, birds and lighthouse keepers; the only visitors, shepherds and naturalists. Perhaps the naturalists might be pleased, but when the last islander left a way of life unique in western Europe would have gone for ever.

By the early 1960s, in the entire one-hundred-and-thirty-mile sweep of the Outer Hebrides, from the Butt of Lewis to Barra Head in the south, there were only six offshore islands that were still occupied by people who made some kind of living from the
sea or the soil. In Orkney and Shetland the populations of the smaller islands had declined steadily over the previous thirty years. In 1951 the population of Foula, twenty-seven miles west of Scalloway in the Shetlands, the northernmost island in Britain, with its amazing cliffs twelve hundred feet high, was seventy-three. In 1961 it was fifty-four. Fara in Scapa Flow was down to four.

Almost all were difficult to reach. The instructions for getting to Taransay were like something from a comic novel:

Tarbert to Horgabust – twelve miles. Taxi. Try to hire the Rev. Macdonald's rowing boat. If he won't lend it light bonfire on headland and hope that the Campbells will pick you up.

The reality was even worse. The rain came down in sheets and you would have needed an incendiary bomb to start a fire anywhere, let alone on a headland. The wind blew Force 7 from south and south-west, and the Sound of Taransay was as impassable as the Strait of Magellan. It took five days to get to the island and then it was only possible in a large fishing boat from Leverburgh in Harris, fourteen miles away.

The owner took the boat in as close as he could and two men came off from the landing place in a rowing-boat. At first I thought they had come to take us ashore but they lay a few feet from us flourishing their oars. The elder one had a splendid beaky nose, rather like a puffin's. He was wearing a postman's uniform. He was the postman, not only to himself but also for the other four inhabitants. His son, who was in his middle twenties, was a larger edition of the older man. They looked hard men.

‘You're not coming ashore.'

‘I'm a writer.' It seemed useless to dissemble.

‘You're a journalist. We had a journalist. Ach, the boggert! We gave him tea. He wrote about the tea.'

‘I won't write about the tea. You can see what I write if you want to.'

Suddenly they capitulated and, laughing, let us get into the boat. The settlement was on the east side, facing the Sound. It was called Paible. Of the sixteen families who lived there before the war only two remained, four men and one woman. The last family left in 1942 but the drift away began in the early 1920s, at the time of Lord Leverhulme's grandiose schemes for the development of Harris as a centre for herring fishing.

There were only three houses on the entire island. There was the schoolhouse by the landing place, in which I found the essay written by the small boy; the school was closed in 1935, and the building was now used by the Macraes, the men who had come out to fetch us, as a store for lobster pots and gear. There was a grey and white two-storeyed house, alone in a great meadow, in which Roderick Campbell who, until recently, had been the owner of Taransay, lived with his younger brother Angus. And there was a magnificent ‘black' house, next to the schoolhouse, in which Ewan Macrae, their brother-in-law, lived (he was married to the Campbells' sister) with his wife and son.

The black house – they were called ‘black' because, before stoves were used, the interiors were stained with the smoke of the burning peat – was one of the most simple and beautiful dwellings ever devised, at least from the outside. Because there was no lime on the island the walls were built of dry-stone, with the spaces between filled with earth to keep the wind out. These walls were anything up to six feet thick, continuous walls with no right angles; everything was rounded, including the roof. It was a perfect shedder of wind. The roof beams were made from driftwood – there were no trees on the island – and the roof was thatched with bent grass, kept in place by a net weighted with stones.

The Macraes lived by lobster fishing; they also looked after the
sheep and cattle for the new owner (Roderick Campbell had recently sold the island, together with all the stock, to John Mackay, who had a garage across the Sound at Horgabust where the Macraes went to fetch the post and stores). They grew barley, rye and cabbages.

The elder Macrae liked the island but was beginning to find the life a hard one. His wife, who was also an islander, felt the same. ‘We've had enough,' they said. The son, Ewan, loved the island life but was ashamed of living in a black house. Like most islanders, he wanted to conform and live in a modern house with ornaments in the windows. He was unmarried. If his parents left, and there was no one to help him with the fishing and peat cutting, existence on the island would be almost impossible for him. The two Campbells, Roderick and Angus, lived a life of remarkable simplicity even for islanders. Neither of them had ever married and Angus, the younger, who was sixty-two, did the cooking on a magnificent old peat stove that was cracked from end to end and occasionally emitted clouds of smoke. ‘We live on fish and tatties,' he said. Both brothers had a markedly quixotic appearance and were slightly disorganized domestically. They liked cuddy, blackfish. At one time the cuddy provided the light on Taransay and other such islands, as well as food: their livers were pressed and the oil was burned in an oil-lamp with the pith of a rush for the wick.

Roderick had recently fallen through the floor of the schoolhouse and torn a muscle in his knee. He could not get about as he used to, and now that he had sold his stock there was not much for him to do anyway. He was anxious about his knee. ‘Do you think it will mend?' he asked. ‘Do you think I was right to sell the island?' Both the brothers had voices as soft as the wind.

I told him I thought he had done right. ‘You've none of the worry and if you want a bottle of whisky to keep the cold out you can have it.'

‘Ah, well! Ah, well! I don't know. Perhaps I was wrong.'

The island had a strange, almost unearthly beauty. Behind the settlement the hills rose gently. Hidden amongst them were two small lochs with trout which Macrae, as a small boy, used to take with a worm for bait, like other small boys before him. In the burn that ran down to the sea there were millstones as big as cartwheels, with which the people used to grind the corn. All along the shores of the Sound were the remains of black houses, now roofless; it was difficult to believe that there were people still living who were born and brought up in them, for they could be as old as the Iron Age hut-circles on Dartmoor, as could the dark ribs of what were once potato beds, regularly spaced on the sides of the hills, like contour lines. On the beaches, the bones of whales, half-buried in the sand, whitened by the wind. ‘The Norwegians brought them here some years back. They brought them here to whiten but they never came back for them and no one knows why.'

There were two cemeteries on the island. Once there were two chapels: one dedicated to St Taran, who crossed from Scotland to Ireland with three of his seven brothers on a stone made buoyant by prayer; the other to St Keith. Women were buried in St Taran's, men in St Keith's. Once, in error, a mixed burial took place and the next day the body was found above ground.

In the part of the island called Aird Vanish, to the south and west, there were great caves in which the sea sucked horribly at the saffron-coloured weed; there were natural arches and sheer cliffs with narrow ledges from which pale-grey, fishy-looking fulmars looked down coldly. Here it was not difficult to imagine the irruption of the Kraken, the great sea monster of the northern seas.

Late at night, in the long twilight, the southern beaches of Aird Vanish, with the spine of a schooner and its mast and spars cast
high on the grass by what must have been the father and mother of storms, were like some place at the end of the world which, indeed, was what they were; curlews and oystercatchers uttered mournful cries, highland cattle, with horns like the handlebars of giant racing bicycles, loomed in the dusk. Two bodies were washed up here, one in the First World War, the other in the Second. They are buried together, high on the storm beach.

Fara, an island in Scapa Flow of only two hundred acres, was even more vulnerable to the threat of total depopulation than Taransay. Its working population was reduced to two: the owner, Mr Watters, and his wife, Ina. Mr Watters was sixty-two. He was born on Hoy, one of the larger islands in Scapa Flow, to the west. He left school when he was twelve and a half and worked as a herdsboy. ‘After three months,' he told me, ‘I was paid £1.80 [$8.75].' In the First World War he served in ammunition ships; in the Second, on a naval tender in Scapa Flow. He had no false ideas about the glamour of war. ‘Everyone says that Churchill won it but where would he have been without all the men who went out of the Flow and never came back?'

His wife was older than he was but looked younger than her age. Neither one of them had had a day's illness in their lives. Mrs Watters was born and went to school on the island. ‘I stayed on until I was thirteen to learn sewing and needlework,' she said. The school closed in 1946.

Before the war there had been twenty-five people on the island, but six of the men had never married. ‘Bachelors have been the ruin of Fara,' Mrs Watters said. They had a son who worked in a fish-and-chip shop in Leeds, and a married daughter in Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney. They were a hard-working couple. Mr Watters fished for lobsters, but working the boat alone and lifting the pots was hard for a man of over sixty, however fit. He had three boats: a rowing-boat, another with an outboard engine, and
a third, with a marine engine, that was slightly larger. Besides fishing for lobsters he also fished for cuddy off Switha, down towards the Pentland Firth. ‘You can take them on a bare hook if it's a shiny one,' he said. They ate the cuddy themselves, smoked. They used to salt them, dry them in the wind, and then hang them up to smoke over the peat stove in the kitchen. Sometimes they had partans (crabs). Partans were virtually unsaleable but excellent eating.

They had three fields under cultivation: oats and turnips for fodder, cabbages and potatoes for themselves, three acres in all. There was not enough grass on the island – much of it had gone back to heather – but with fertilizers and more scientific farming the island could probably have supported three farms instead of one, and many more sheep. (The Watters used seaweed for manure.)

Mrs Watters looked after the lambs, but 1964 had been a bad year. Twenty lambs died and they lost a number of rams as well. She also helped her husband with the peat cutting. They could only cut peat in the spring and summer because frost spoilt it, and you needed a drying wind. The cutting was done with a long-handled peat knife and for anyone not used to it, it was a herculean labour – six cuts weighed half a hundredweight. They used to work at it for two and a half hours a day until they had cut enough to see them through the winter. It grew dark very early in winter, about half past three – Fara is in 58° 51' N – and it was not light until nine. In winter they sat by the peat stove in the kitchen and Mr Watters made lobster pots and his wife knitted socks. They had a wireless and an old gramophone. Mrs Watters was also the postmistress. Like Mr Macrae on Taransay, she got paid for the job. She was also in charge of the telephone-box, which stood in splendid isolation in the midst of nothingness, half a mile from the house. If you wanted to telephone them you
had to write first. It would have cost them £14 ($40) to have it moved nearer the house and it did not seem worth it.