The MacKenzies were all quiet as the dinghy set out, each drawn to his or her own memories and thoughts. The St Kildans were kneeling on the rocks and on the beach. Lizzie saw Betty standing a little apart from the others. The sun, still kind to her, had flicked some silver into the waves of her hair. The two women had said their farewells and Lizzie had locked her friend into her heart along with all the other memories of the island, good and bad: memories she would hold for later – telling them back silently to herself, naming her loss.
MacKinnon started to sing, and soon the others joined in the psalm. Behind them, like a mocking grin along the slope, lay the tidy street of new houses. The fierce geometry of the village was softened by the green light which poured down from the hills.
Once safely aboard the cutter, Lizzie stood with the children at the stern. Eliza was a grown-up girl now and a great help to her mother. She was looking after her siblings, and Lizzie watched as they pointed out parts of the receding island to each other, shouting agitatedly as they caught sight of a friend waving or a well-known spot where they had played and which was therefore invested with mystery and meaning. Lizzie followed their gaze and wondered what it must be like for them to look at their home from the sea for the first time. Once again she asked herself how these children would cope on the mainland. They had never seen any trees or forests or great fields of wheat. They had never seen a town or a village with horses and pigs. She had been afraid at the beginning of what the island might do to them. Now she was afraid of the mainland. How could she protect them? She gripped the hand of Patrick, who stood beside her. At least he would be fine, as he was too young to remember anything from the island. She felt his tiny hand in hers and knew that she would not always be able to hold it.
She searched the green slopes for the little graveyard her husband had built and which enclosed the graves of her three dead children. She could not say if she was looking forward to returning to the world; nor could she imagine what life there would be like. She had a new purpose: to guide her children like an eider duck until they could swim on their own. Then she would tow them gently behind.
She looked up to see her husband standing alone at the bulwarks on the starboard side. His face was withdrawn and masked and she felt a rush of pity.
As the canvas was raised and the cutter fell off to the south-east, MacKenzie turned from the island, away from the wind and the yammer of kittiwakes in Village Bay, and faced the open sea and the Long Isle beyond. Fulmars were skimming the waves around the ship and a myriad of gannets coasted for a moment high over the mainmast before remembering their purpose and returning to their homes in the rocks. Only once did he look back, to see for the last time the sun riding over the ridge of Mullach Sgar sitting comfortably in the saddle of Ruiaval before arriving safely at the battlements of Dùn.
As the island subsided into the vanishing skies behind him he took out of his coat his Gaelic bible and opened it to the title page where his name had once been inscribed. For a moment he looked at the browning ink that spelled out his past before he closed the book and, leaning over the bulwarks, dropped it into the silencing sea.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is a fictionalised portrait of the historic lives of the Rev. Neil MacKenzie and his wife. It builds largely on documentary sources – including notes by Neil MacKenzie, George Clayton Atkinson, Lachlan MacLean and George Sands – and published research, perhaps most importantly the work of Dr Mary Harman and Professor Andrew Fleming. Students of these texts will realise that I have taken a number of liberties regarding the individual characters and their personalities, but the account is accurate in most historical details.
The lines in italics on page 87 are taken from George Atkinson’s ‘Notice of St Kilda’, published in 1832 in Transactions of the Natural History Society of Northumberland 2, pp. 215–25.
The lyrics on pages 81 and 159–60 are versions of traditional songs. Calum Ferguson offers a good selection of St Kildan songs (some of which were originally noted down by MacKenzie) in St Kildan Heritage, published by Acair in Stornoway in 2006.
After leaving St Kilda, Neil and Elizabeth MacKenzie had another two daughters: Helen, who died in her first year, and Eleanora Alexandra, who lived for almost a hundred years. The family eventually settled in Kilchrenan on the banks of Loch Awe in Argyll. Lizzie died at the age of sixty-one and was buried in the churchyard at Kilchrenan in 1864. Neil lived on for another fifteen years. He died while staying with his youngest daughter in Glasgow. The funeral cortège, with full Victorian splendour, journeyed by road and water for over ninety miles in order to reach the grave at Kilchrenan in December 1879.
Betty Scott drowned in 1863 when the 30-foot Dargavel – carrying a group of starving St Kildans who had set out to seek aid from the mainland – sank with all hands.
The St Kildans joined the Free Church, and the kirk and manse at St Kilda stood empty and locked for many years. Eventually a new minister from the established Church, the Rev. John MacKay, arrived on the island in 1865. By then the social and demographic culture on St Kilda was much altered, a third of the population having left the island in 1853 in order to seek a better life in Australia.
The neonatal death rate on St Kilda in the 1830s was about sixty per cent. The cause of death – which the St Kildans called the ‘eight-day sickness’, as the affected infants tended to die within a couple of weeks of birth – was neonatal tetanus. The origin of tetanus was not known until 1884. Scientists have found high levels of the tetanus toxin in the St Kildan soil, possibly due to the fact that bird carcasses were ploughed into the fields as manure. A suggestion has been made that contaminated fulmar oil was used on the umbilical cord when a child was born, but there is no clear evidence of this practice and it is more likely that the infants were infected by the knife used to cut the cord in a generally very unhygienic environment.
Hirta was finally evacuated in 1930 after life on the island had become unsustainable. As they left their native island for the last time it is said that the remaining thirty-six St Kildans lit fires in their hearths and left their bibles on the tables, each one opened at the first page of Exodus.
*
I am grateful to the Thora Olsson Cultural Fund, which funded part of the preparation for this book, including a trip to St Kilda and the Outer Hebrides in the summer of 2007.
I am also indebted to several people who offered their kind assistance during the research, particularly the staff at the National Archives of Scotland and The British Library, and Alma Topen, Duty Archivist at Glasgow University.
Thank you, also, to Tim Pickering, skipper of 58 Degrees North, to Amanda Clarke who first told me about the excavations on St Kilda, and to Therese Lloyd, Michael Holroyd and Ingemar Fasth who walked with me on the ice.
My particular thanks are due to my agent Gill Coleridge and to my editor Jon Riley for their enthusiasm, good faith and great encouragement. I owe much to the two of them – as well as to Cara Jones at RCW and to Georgina Difford and Charlotte Clerk at Quercus – for piloting my book through the skerries towards publication.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born and brought up in southern Sweden, KARIN ALTENBERG moved to Britain to study in 1996. She holds a Ph.D. in Archaeology from the University of Reading. Her thesis was published in 2001 and won the Nordenstedska Foundation Award. She is currently senior advisor to the Swedish National Heritage Board and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. Island of Wings is her first novel and she is currently working on her second.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and
Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”
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