A short walk from the museum is the brick tower of the old church, now bereft of the church itself, and in the grassy churchyard is another reminder of the former days – a sailor’s tombstone made into a sanctuary by a fence of whalebones.
In the summer Borkum is famed for its seaside delights, the widespread beaches, the casino, the concert hall, the Kurhaus, and the swimming pool that provides artificial waves – as if the real thing were not plentifully available.
But now the winds and mists of winter were following each other to the shore. People walked in a manner which told you they thought they were doing something good for their health. A small crowd gathered to watch an intrepid man, in a bathing suit like a circus strongman, wade into the leaden sea. On the promenade those who were brave enough to sit, watched container ships moving down the sea lanes. The spectators moved their stance a little every few minutes as they followed the shadowy vessels along the horizon.
On the beach the coloured tents, set out like hundreds of sentry boxes, were standing awry, some leaning one way, some another – a scene of autumn desolation. An old man in an overcoat, like a last-ditch defender, was sitting to the leeward side of his tent, in a hole he had dug in the sand. Inside the tent his wife, rotund and red, gazed out at the ebbing tide.
The bandstand on the promenade is more substantial than most of its kind, like a large stone birdcage, the music stands of the summer abandoned within the windowed apertures. It was here that I first heard the strings on the cold air and imagined that it might be the echo of a ghostly concert. But then I realized that the sounds were coming from the Kurhalle Am Meer, a nicely poised building, its windows facing the promenade. I went inside and joined the final Kaffe takers and cake-crunchers of the year. When the band had finished its programme – detailed on a printed sheet at the door – with a last rendition of Toselli’s Serenade, it packed up its instruments and went home. I saw the leader, a young man, his spangled coat now replaced by a leather jacket, go out of the front door. I went too. It was all finished for that year.
BORKUM situated latitude 53°35’N and longitude 6°40’E; area 14 sq. m (36 sq. km); population approx. 7,750; Germany
The Lesser Scottish Islands
Isle of My Heart
‘O, these endless little isles’
T. S. MUIR, Ecclesiological Notes on some of the Islands of Scotland
Those outriders of Britain, the smallest, tallest and most remote of the Scottish Islands, lie out there in their distant tides like shadows on the northern horizon. St Kilda, Mingulay, the Flannans, North Rona, Fair Isle, Foula. The poetry of their names is matched only by the romance of their wild situations.
On midnight evenings in summer, they sometimes stand on a sea of tranquillity with the dusk dying around them; on winter days, when it is barely light before it is again dark, they are awash with the most powerful waves of the world. Some still have habitations and people, but others gave up the struggle long ago and now remain silent and vacant except for the birds, the Atlantic seals and the wind.
Using the old measurement of an island (in these waters anyway) – that it has enough pasture to graze one sheep for a year – the Scottish isles are said to number one for each day in the calendar. The Orkneys and Shetlands sit like a mitre above the head of the mainland, with the closely-grouped Hebrides a cloak on its back. But far out in the big seas are other places.
St Kilda presents the most awesome rockscape of any in Europe. Four islands rising abruptly from the Atlantic, a hundred miles off the coast of mainland Scotland: Hirta, Soay, Dun and Boreray, the latter rising a sheer 1,200 feet from the sea, and with their attendant rocks, Stac Lee, 544 feet, the home of 40,000 pairs of gannets and Stac an Armin, 627 feet, the highest single rock in Britain.
Once here was a community cut off from the world for much of the year, a village alongside a sheltered bay, a scoop in the fearsome landscape. The people lived, mainly, on seabirds and their eggs, for these islanders were renowned climbers. Young men had to scale the 300-foot Maidens Rock, and stand on one foot at the top before they were permitted to marry. It was proof, said the elders, that the husband could provide for a family.
Unfortunately the little group could not provide for itself. The men met every day in a ‘Parliament’ to decide on important issues, but sometimes the talking took so long that nothing was done about anything. Babies died of tetanus because of the primitive ritual of smearing the navel with dung after birth. Pneumonia and tuberculosis were killers and there was no doctor on the island. Eventually, after a winter of great hardship, the St Kilda missionary wrote to the British Government in the spring of 1930 requesting that the thirty remaining islanders be taken off to the mainland. On 29 August, the fishery protection cruiser HMS Harebell and a cargo vessel arrived in Village Bay and the St Kildans sailed away from their island for the last time. Romance and reality are often poor bedfellows.
St Kilda was left to the storms and windy sunshine. Its houses fell, its little gardens grew over. The sheep on Soay, brought there first by the Vikings a thousand years ago, hardly noticed the departure of the humans. The island has an army contingent now, a tracking unit for a missile range in the Hebrides, and the National Trust for Scotland takes parties out there in the summer to restore the houses. But it will never be the same again.
The Gaelic-speaking people of Mingulay, on the southernmost tail of the Hebrides, used to call it Eilean Mo Chridhe, the Isle of My Heart, for they dearly loved it. Many lived and died there without ever leaving. They did not believe there was any better place to be. But today this is a haunted island too, no peat smoke from the chimneys, no voices calling across the water, no winter stories by the fireside.
Other islands are haunted too. The Flannans, or the Seven Hunters as they are also called, remote and beautiful; their sole habitation the lighthouse where three keepers vanished. One night the light had failed and when a boat was sent to investigate it found no trace of the men. No one has ever been able to resolve that mystery.
Even before that the Flannans held simple men in thrall. When fishermen from Lewis went ashore there they observed a whole catalogue of superstitious rituals to keep evil away and refused to mention certain places and things by the usual names. A custom that lingers even now. In some islands a clergyman – called an Upstander – is considered to be an unlucky passenger in a boat and the hull will be washed out after he has left.
There is another ghostly island too, North Rona, lying north of the halfway point between the head of Scotland at Cape Wrath and the Butt of Lewis. But in the seventeenth century a book written about North Rona by Martin Martin Gentleman, who had also travelled to St Kilda, describes life on the island as idyllic. There were, he observed, ‘ . . . five families who lived a harmless life being perfectly ignorant of most of the vices which abound in the world . . . They have an agreeable and hospitable temper for all strangers. They take their surname from the colours of the sky, the rainbow and the clouds.’ He describes how one man, wanting a wife, sent a shilling with a missionary to Lewis and a wife was sent to him by the next yearly supply boat.
North Rona suffered depopulation and it was not until 1884 that it had further inhabitants – two men who had quarrelled with their minister at Ness went into exile on the island. They lived there, like castaways, for a year. In the summer of 1885 a boatman found them dead, one with his plaid laid reverently across his body. They had kept track of the days by marking notches on a stick. The last notch was for 17 February.
Most of the little out-islands are now only home for howling seals and sheep, and the roaming seabirds of the north, the arctic skua and the gannet, the fulmer, the comical puffin, the oyster catcher and the tern. Today the most remote inhabited place in Britain is Fair Isle, lying south of Shetland, with neighbouring Foula to its north, which lacks a good harbour. Even Christmas is a movable feast there, depending on the arrival of the supply boat.
Fair Isle was always beckoning me (to hear it named every day
on the radio weather forecasts was enticement enough) and it was a happy time when I looked out from the south of Mainland island, in Shetland, and saw it, far off, like a shade on the skyline. I made several journeys there, each one three-and-a-half turbulent hours in the sturdy little boat The Good Shepherd. It takes the course where the Atlantic seas surge in to meet those of the North Sea. The boat’s size is limited and it has to be taken from the water at the end of its journey.
The voyage is wonderfully worthwhile. For here is the outpost of birds, and landfall for the migrations from the Arctic. The sound of wings and bird calls are all over the island. Fair Isle rises spectacularly from the waves, the pinnacle of Sheep Craig dominating everything else. The Craig is the nearest thing to a vertical meadow and sheep are grazed there throughout the year, being taken over on a set day and then, the men having climbed a chain, hauled to the grass at the top.
Within the fastness of the majestic cliffs is a mild, smiling, open island, with its houses and two churches, its post office and shop, and its village hall, spread over the gentle landscape; everything within sight of everything else, but no neighbour too near another. It is an arrangement that has worked for generations.
It was the dream of a man called George Waterson to own this fine but remote island (given to Scotland as a dowry for a Norwegian princess). While he was a prisoner of war in the 1940s he thought about the island constantly and, on his repatriation from Sweden, Fair Isle riding on the sea was his first sight of his homeland. He paid £5,000 for it in 1947 and dedicated it to the birds. Now the National Trust for Scotland administers it and a comfortable bird observatory with accommodation for visitors (not only ornithologists) has replaced the old and shaky wartime huts which I remember from my early visits.
The island is famous for its Fair Isle knitting, a cross-pattern, the secrets of which are still guarded by a select group of Fair Isle women. Legend says the secrets came from a wrecked Spanish galleon. The composition of the dyes which go into the wool is still only known to a few. The women meet regularly to inspect the garments knitted before they are sent to exclusive customers all over the world but demand for Fair Isle knitwear far exceeds supply today. Some garments are sent back for repair after many years of wear.
I remember one evening in summer – the long late light they call the ‘simmer dim’ – talking to a lady called Mrs Busta (named after her house since the majority of the population have the same surname – Stout) about her island. She was shy about her love for it, but then she said that she liked it because it was clear and treeless. Trees spoiled the view, and anywhere else she would not be able to feel and see and hear the ocean all around her. In saying that she spoke for so many islanders everywhere. They are a special people.
FAIR ISLE, SHETLAND situated latitude 59°32’N and longitude 1°40’W; area 6 sq. m (15 sq. km); population approx. 75; Britain (private ownership). ST KILDA, HEBRIDES latitude 57°50’N and longitude 8°32’W; area 1 sq. m (2.5 sq. km); uninhabited; Britain (National Trust for Scotland)
Isle of Man
A Picture from Childhood
Come for a while
Back to your isle
Of dreams.
1930s popular song
If happiness is an island, then, I suppose, the Isle of Man meant that for me. It was the first island I ever set foot upon; that was at the end of World War II and the end of my childhood.
In the summer of 1945 I was fourteen years old. The immediate years behind me had been in disarray. My parents had died – my father in a ship on the ocean and my mother six months later – and I had found myself in an orphanage. This, however, had its compensations and one of these was a summer camp on the Isle of Man. It was wonderful; the war was over, the sun shone (with the constancy that only occurred when you were young) and there was I sailing, with forty or so other boys – and girls! – from Liverpool to Douglas, the island capital, aboard a jaunty-funnelled ferry called the Ben My Cree.
We camped in the grounds of a house at Lezayre, a hamlet with a dark church, two-thirds to the north of the island. There was a shallow cold river called the Sulby, where every day we swam. We explored the limpid glens, climbed Snaefell Mountain, saw, from its summit, the countries of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales, went to the seaside at Ramsey, and surveyed in wonder the great water-wheel of the old lead mines at Laxey. I also fell in love.
I discovered early what a distress that can be. One translucent evening I went with my beloved, who was thirteen and had a sharp turn of phrase, to the beach. Determined to impress her I set out to swim to the sunset. I swam and swam, far out where the cormorants were diving for fish. The water became grey and cold and my loved one had diminished to a dot on the distant shore. Enough was enough. I turned and stroked my way back. It was a long way. The water became colder and the air darker, and I was relieved when at last I staggered on my skinny legs up the shingle. She stood there, my heart’s object, looking at my thin shivering skin, my eyes, misty and reddened, and at the water dripping down my somewhat long nose. ‘You know,’ she said eventually, ‘you’ve got a face just like a crow.’
I’ve got over it now (even the nose has fallen more or less into place as the flesh around it has increased), but on the several times I have returned to the isle since that boyhood summer I have remembered it a little ruefully. Once, long after, I drove over the silent mountain and down along the shady, remembered road, stopping outside the house at Lezayre. It was late twilight and the white walls were as pale as people’s faces at dusk. I did not go in, but merely looked over the gate and then through the hedge into the field where we had pitched our tents. You can never call it back, can you? It’s gone. Everything seemed much smaller and somehow sad, but the evening was so tranquil that I could hear the Sulby river bubbling over its stones in the distant shadows.
I remembered that hedgerow especially. In that first post-war summer they restarted the famous Isle of Man motor-cycle races, the Tourist Trophy, and the road alongside the hedge was one of the fastest parts of the course. The riders took a sharp bend at Sulby Bridge and then rushed down the straight at 120 miles an hour. Practice runs were made at six in the morning and we boys stood in the hedge and watched the riders turn the bend and rush by, leaving the air full of fumes and our ears full of roar. Now, at that time, there was a lot of military clothing and stores on the civilian market (I used to wear an army tunic to school!) and at the camp my bed was warmed by a red blanket, the sort used in hospitals. One morning, to watch the TT practice, I put this around my shoulders and the daredevil riders skidded and braked in a terrible tangle. Fortunately none was hurt and I stood puzzled by the occurrence until an official approached and asked me to refrain from draping my shoulders with the ‘Immediate Danger Ahead’ signal!
When I was on the island again, I drove along part of the TT course, out of Douglas and towards Peel. Every bend and wall and post was sandbagged and padded, giving the route the appearance of preparing for some impending war. In 1945 the whole seafront at Douglas looked like that, bulwarks and bastions, the tall Georgian houses and hotels painted grey, for the whole stretch was officially a ship – HMS Valkyrie. Aliens were detained on the Isle of Man during the war, some of them with little justification; some, indeed, had only just escaped from Nazi Germany.
There is another wartime story associated with the island which concerned the very ship Ben My Cree (named after a character of the island writer, Hall Caine) that had taken me on that first romantic voyage. In June 1940 she was in the fleet of nondescript vessels sent to evacuate the beleaguered British army from the beaches at Dunkirk. One of these soldiers, in a letter written many years later to the English magazine Country Life, described how he managed to board the vessel after tramping for miles across the battlefield. He was dirty, hot and exhausted, so imagine his delight when, on getting aboard the ferry, he found a properly white-coated steward, polishing the bar. The ship was rocking from bombs and shells, wounded lay on her upper decks, but this p
hlegmatic orderly was ignoring it all. The soldier approached gladly and asked for a large drink. As the explosions rocked the vessel, the steward shook his head: ‘Sorry sir,’ he said with a pained face. ‘We are not allowed to serve alcoholic drinks while the ship is in port.’
*
The Isle of Man is a place of garrisons, glens and ghosts. There are powerfully built fortresses at salient places on its coast, the greatest being on St Patrick’s Isle, across the fishing harbour at Peel. The ghost of the Moddy Dhoo, the black dog, still pads the towers at night. Long ago I remembered hearing at the campfire how it sent a soldier raving mad – and I looked around to see the wide, utterly believing eyes of my childhood companions. The sylvan glens that run through the island hills, with streams and waterfalls tinkling through the woods, are, naturally, the haunts of elves and goblins. On the road between Douglas and Ronaldsway Airport is the Fairy Bridge (marked with a proper road sign) where all passers are obliged, as they cross, to call, ‘Goodnight Little People.’ Most do.
As you approach Peel, at the foot of the Greeba Mountain is the church of St Trinian’s, with walls and tower but no roof. A bad fairy called a Buggare was blamed for the roof being blown off.
Peel is a staunch little town, houses facing directly across to Ireland. The piled castle protects the harbour from the worst of the ocean weather, which comes in at any season with a dark and disturbing enthusiasm. It was June when I was last there. The coloured fishing boats bounced and creaked against the jetties, gulls screamed against the wind and the houses of the town were dark across the bay, a darkness broken by an occasional and romantic shaft of wan sunshine. It is a fine place; I went into an inn where there was a summer fire burning in the grate, bought some famous Manx kippers – smoked herrings – and marvelled at the strange names above the old shops. The island has the oddest collection of names in Britain – Quale, Quinlan, Quiggin and Quirk, and suchlike, to families rejoicing in the title of Looney.
My World of Islands Page 13