The Ice Museum (9 page)

He was a strawberry blond, pulling on a jumper as he stood in the doorway, squinting in the cold light. The skin around his eyes creased into intricate lines as he spoke. He grimaced at the wind, which gusted against the door, almost slamming him back inside. I raised my voice, as the wind became a howl echoing around the quayside buildings. ‘What do you think?' I tried to shout. ‘Do you think Shetland was Thule?'

He shrugged again. ‘I really couldn't say,' he replied, his face blank. And then, more hospitably, ‘Come back later, you'll see a real old get-together.' And he waved me back into the wind.

In a chorus, Greek in its fatalism, the locals I spoke to mourned the recent refurbishment of Thule, the turning of everything to chrome. The Thule Bar had once been a place of character, they said, where you might have bumped into a business lunch, a drunks' party, and a wedding reception, all on the same day. But in the evening the bar was always full, the chrome walls slick with sweat, and the shining floor sticky with beer.

The morning was cold and gaunt and the streets were jaundiced, stained by the pale sun. I lingered under the grey terraces, as the gulls circled and the rain slammed onto the slate. At noon the ferry moved slowly out of the port. The streets grew busy, and I walked past the Crystal Shop, the Harbour Café, with its stream of damp sailors waiting at the window for chips, the shop selling Shetland knitwear, which was also called Thule. Thule was having a quiet time of it in Shetland—the people I asked were polite but baffled, as anyone might be, stopped by a stranger on a windy street, and asked about a land called Thule. Thule was elusive, even in a former Thule, and the people of Lerwick weren't setting too much store by it.

But they lived on a quiet island, a ragged and wild island, a place where winds gusted across the harbours and battered the buildings. It was a land of moss plains, peat stretches and bright green islands lapped by sea froth. A place of gashed mountains, inky tarns and streams. The rain drew a rich smell of peat from the drenched valleys. A short walk out of Lerwick, I found a deserted coastal path winding across slippery stones, from where I watched the surge of waves across the beach. My only company was a shy cat stalking along the path, which squeezed under a fence and disappeared. As the day drew on, the sun grew stronger in the sky, drying the sides of the houses, gleaming on the rocks.

Shetland was a place where the peat plains had preserved traces of the distant past, the shapes of houses and forts embedded in the soft ranges. At the edge of Lerwick, beyond the grey pebbledash buildings and the painted wooden housing estates, there was the Loch of Clickhimin and a low knoll. On the knoll were stone ruins, older than the Roman tales of Thule, older than Pytheas's first sighting of the mystery island in the north. The first settlers came to Shetland thousands of years before the Roman invasion of Britain. Long before Pytheas sailed, these settlers came from Orkney in skin-covered open boats, across the blistered sea. Remains were found near Sumburgh, in the south: smashed bones and fragments, hammerstones and beads.

These settlers lived quietly in small stone houses, growing grain, fishing, tending cattle, leaving their litter across the peat plains—their ploughshares, discs and stone balls, pendants, pins, rings in bronze, glass beads, bone pins and antler necklaces. They left ruins scattered across the land, the cracked remnants of their houses, preserved in the spangled cotton-grass and the low plains of moss. There was one wall at Clickhimin, sunken in the earth, and the circular walls of a stone tower, built around the time the Romans came to Britain. The stone tower had supplied protection against enemies, but no trace remained of the reasons for their wars. Grass had grown around the rim of the tower; the roof lay open to the sky. For millennia, these brochs stood, scattered along the coasts, turrets on wind-lashed islands. Looking out at the sea or across the hills and bogs gashed with deep earth cracks.

Stones lay littered across the fields: low walls that were once houses, built thousands of years ago, overgrown with moss. Driving through soft valleys, where the sun chased the shadows across the hills, I found a gate singing in the wind, and an oval-shaped ruin a few feet high, which might have been a temple, or a village hall, or a burial chamber. To the eerie song of the gate, I stood at the edge of the building, finding I was reluctant to walk inside. The external outline was almost complete, the shape of the building preserved in the ruined walls. All the forgotten worshippers, dancers, villagers, or farmers would have seen were the matted green hills, stretching away. The sea was invisible, making the site unusual in Shetland, where the sea is never more than a few miles away. But the significance of the location was lost, and nobody knew for certain what the building had been used for, what forgotten protocol or practices it had embodied. These islands were covered with these low walls of stone, the moss-coated debris of thousands of years ago. The people lived quietly along the coasts, and the winds blasted symphonies across the rocks and the waves drummed on the sands.

Later, I went back to the Thule Bar, running into the bunker building as the rain fell in sheets. I sat on a chrome stool by the bar, my clothes dripping on the floor, but no one minded. The locals were jovial and polite, speaking in their thick Scots-Scandinavian accents, but even after a few beers, they still weren't sure that Shetland was Thule. Like a consortium of pedants, they were careful with the past, refusing to leap to a conclusion.

‘But what about the Romans?' I said, speaking above the sound of the bar. ‘What about the Romans arriving two thousand years ago, saying that the north of Britain must be Thule?' They were nodding politely, looking blank. ‘The Roman historian Tacitus,' I said, causing a Shetlander to upset his glass, ‘said that Thule was Shetland.'

‘Tacitus!' someone bellowed across the bar, as if he were proposing a toast.

Tacitus placed Thule north-east of the Scottish mainland, and gave the credit for finding it to his father-in-law, Agricola. Agricola sent out the fleet which found Thule, wrote Tacitus, on a mission to circumnavigate Britain, and his fleet had seen Thule across the torpid waves of Ocean. Britain, wrote Tacitus, was the largest land known to the Romans: its northern shores had no lands opposite them, but were beaten by the wastes of a vast empty sea. In A.D. 77, Agricola became governor of Britain, taking up the post at a time when the land remained uneasy. In the years after he arrived, Agricola moved his armies north. The soldiers, wrote Tacitus, were prone to bragging, claiming that their battles against the local tribes were as mythical as the conquest of Ocean.

There were skirmishes between the Romans and the Caledonians, and then the armies faced each other for a major battle. Tacitus reports the speech one of the Caledonian leaders made, a speech curiously laden with a Roman sense of Britain as the last land to the north: ‘There is no land beyond us and even the sea is no safe refuge when we are threatened by the Roman fleet,' he said, according to Tacitus. ‘Today the furthest bounds of Britain lie open—and everything unknown is given an inflated worth. But now there is no people beyond us, nothing but tides and rocks and, more deadly than these, the Romans . . . They have pillaged the world: when the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea.'

And Agricola's rallying cry to his troops drew similarly on notions of remoteness, invoked in order to emphasize Roman supremacy: ‘The furthest point of Britain is no longer a matter of report or rumour; we hold it, with forts and with arms. Britain has been discovered and subjugated . . . And it would not be inglorious to die at the very place where the world and nature end.' The Roman Army had found out the coward Britons, he said, the Britons who hid in the furthest reaches of their remote country: ‘They have not made a stand, they have been trapped.'

Tacitus claimed that the battle was won by the superior tactics of the Romans; some thousands of Britons were killed, and only a few hundred on the Roman side, he wrote. ‘The Britons dispersed, men and women mingling their cries of grief, dragging off the wounded, calling out to survivors, abandoning their homes and in their rage even setting fire to them, choosing hiding places, and then leaving them again at once.' The Romans passed a joyful night, delighted at the ‘outcome and the booty,' and in the morning, under the dawn light, their victory could be seen across the land: ‘the silence of desolation on all sides, the hills lonely, homesteads smouldering in the distance, not a man to encounter the scouts.' As the summer was over, Agricola decided to stop the battle. He instructed the prefect of the fleet to sail around Britain; forces were allocated for the purpose. Agricola settled the cavalry and infantry in their winter quarters. When he left Britain, he ‘handed over to his successor a province peaceful and secure,' wrote Tacitus.

The Roman fleet Agricola sent out discovered the islands called Orcades, and ‘Thule also was surveyed; their instructions taking them only so far: besides, winter was approaching.' Thule was seen, across the capricious Ocean, before the ships sailed southwards. Thule for Tacitus might have been the Shetland Isles. The Roman fleet found their ships were impeded by the sea, as Pytheas's had been centuries earlier. The obstinate waves, slowing their oars, were further proof, they might have thought, that they had found Pytheas's Thule—the land in the congealed Ocean.

Through the windows of the Thule Bar, this beer-stained corner of antiquity, I saw only the folds of the mist, and the baroque patterns of the churning ocean, as the rain lashed the glass, and the fog coiled tighter round the town. There was a local who had a fistful of theories, none of them about Thule, and he seemed in a conspiratorial mood. He was wearing a greasy pair of jeans, a crumpled shirt, and his face was ruddy and chapped. ‘I've got a good story for you,' he said. ‘Better than that Thule story you're talking about.' He asked the barman for two whiskies, and handed me one. ‘Drink that, it's a cold gale outside,' he said.

His name was Douglas, and he had worked in a fishing institute for years. His mother had met his father here during World War Two, he said. His father had come from occupied Norway on a boat.

‘It was called the Shetland Bus,' he said. ‘The resistance in Norway arranged for people to sail their small boats over. If they were caught by the Germans they were killed or imprisoned. My father—he came from a small fishing village, north of Bergen on the western coast of Norway—he couldn't stand living under the Germans. He was a fine man. His name was Olav, like the kings of Norway, you know. So he set off with his brother in a boat—they were terrified. They were stuck in storms and they thought the boat would go under. But they arrived in a port further north from here, on the island of Unst. Their boat couldn't take them further, so they just settled where they landed. The people welcomed them, glad to help. My father always talked about how grateful he had been, that the people were so kind. And my father got some work with my mother's father. He didn't know her then, of course. He said the first day he was there, he was working away in the yard, trying to fix some piece of machinery, and this woman appeared—she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. But he was shy, quite young of course, and didn't want to bother the boss's daughter. He thought he'd lose his job, and then what would he do? Straight back to Norway and to the Nazis, and after all that rocking around in the sea, it would have been a terrible thing. So he did nothing. He just worked hard every day, and every time he saw her he said he almost dropped the hammer, or whatever he was using, she was so beautiful.'

‘It has a happy ending,' said the barman, who was listening. ‘Don't you worry yourself, it's a great ending.'

Douglas smiled, gripping his pint between rough fingers. ‘The ending is me and my sister and brother. So you could say it's happy. Finally, my poor dad plucked up the courage. You can imagine the lad, speaking with his Norwegian accent, trying to ask her if she would marry him. He thought that was the best thing to try. Everything or nothing. Turned out she was in love with him. Had loved him the moment she saw him. He stayed on Shetland for the rest of his life. They were always happy.'

And Doug smiled again, swilling his whisky round his glass. ‘Something in the peat,' said another man at the bar.

Later, I drifted out of the conversation at the bar, as a group listed the Top Ten Drunks of Thule, and I thought how the Romans had taken the elements as their evidence. The briny sea, the resistant waves convinced the Romans they had found Thule when they arrived in Britain. It was all tenuous. I sat in Lerwick, with the wind wailing outside and the mist swirling at the windows. A more self-effacing collection of people was impossible to imagine; the regulars at the bar hardly laid claim to the place at all. A couple of guide books ran the story out, mumbling briefly about the Romans, before sliding into something else entirely, but that was it for Shetland-Thule. A collection of cautious locals, a bar and a knitwear shop. A ragged, empty place, with its crusted peat bogs and bright green islands. It was affecting and slightly strange. Strange to find this outpost at the edge of Britain. Strange to find it so littered with ancient stones, ancient houses, all alluding faintly to the past.

In Shetland, I drove up and down the islands, sitting on car ferries as the evening fell, crunching the gears on the coastal paths. Green hills slipped away in the rear-view mirror. Most of the time I was alone on the coasts, at the peat ruins and the brochs. But there was a ragged collection of Viking stones, called Jarlshof, in the south of Shetland, where the car park was full of buses and German and Norwegian tourists queued at a ticket office. Jarlshof was a composite site, the accumulated ruins from thousands of years of habitation on the island, and a shattered house on a cliff, left by the Stewart earls of Orkney and Shetland, abandoned since the seventeenth century. Sir Walter Scott, who found the hills of Shetland a perfect retreat, had given Jarlshof its name. Scott thought the cragged castles, derelict stone lashed by waves, made for a romantic backdrop, though all he saw were the surface ruins, the storm-smashed house on the cliff. He knew nothing about the middens, piled with leftovers from earlier settlements. It was only in the last century that the surging of the storm waters revealed stone walls, and the layers of ancient foundations.