I turned away from him so he couldn’t see how that had wounded.
‘The people deserve better than to see you like this. They’re not used to strong drink and it’s wrong of you to set this example. With all you have. . .’ I stopped myself.
‘Thing is, Fred. People always assume I have everything, but it’s an illusion. I have nothing for me, you see. The fact is I’ll do what I have to do, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I’ve agreed to go into law after Cambridge.’
‘A lawyer? But your studies. Both of us carrying on at Cambridge, a dig in North Africa, together. A professorship one day.’
‘I thought you understood. Having a large estate isn’t always the blessing one assumes. The place consumes more than it makes. Has done so for a long time. So, there it is, Father may be the laird, but in reality he’s working in a law firm in London most of the time. And from his last letter doesn’t look like he’s come up with a way to keep the island, but don’t mention that here, of course. So there it is. We’ll have to sell and I’ll have to make my own way in the world like any other chap these days.’
‘I’m so sorry. To lose the island, how could you bear it?’
He sighed, a what-can-you-do-about-it shrug. Got up and grinned. ‘Now, bathing. There’s an idea.’ He left the house, pulling off his jersey and shoes and trousers, me running behind to gather them up from the grass and then the sand. Down to his underpants, he plunged into the sea.
Behind us, the villagers had come out to see the sight of poor Archie Macleod going mad. No one among them had ever chosen to plunge into the sea half-naked. He dived like a cormorant under the skin of the green sea, and moments later came up from the waves. ‘Bloody freezing,’ he yelled.
And there was Chrissie, laughing with the girls, their faces shocked and mischievous and admiring. And I thought, damn it, why not? So I stripped down to my long johns and ran in the sea to join him.
For that is the effect Archie has on people. You don’t know what he’ll do next, or why you will join him.
And shaking his hair like a dog, he towelled himself down with his shirt while the black-and-white or yellow mongrels ran in and out of the sea, spraying him with water again from their shaggy long coats.
CHAPTER 21
Fred
ST KILDA, 1927
The progress I’d made on my paper spurred Archie on to finish his own report. I’d been up early each day, gathering rocks, cataloguing them, telling the story of the island since its birth as a volcanic eruption from the sea. I’d row out early to trace the darker basalt columns along Dùn, the layers and folds of rocks almost as old as the world itself. In reply, Archie spent long hours digging down into the floor of the fairies’ house, laying out the finds he made on a table in the byre, a piece of pottery, deer antlers on an island with no deer, masses of limpets from a human midden and another smooth-ended granite hand axe that confirmed that people had surely lived on the island since Neolithic times. That project completed, he began a survey of an ancient dwelling over in the Great Glen, a beehive structure known as the warrior queen’s house, which he reckoned Norse or earlier from the construction and attached legends. Day after day, he went over there, digging and sifting through the soil, layer by layer, with young Callum and Lachie to help, though I suspected that from the amount the whisky was going down in the bottles that there was a fair bit of relaxing with a dram at the end of each day.
‘Could you not excavate some other structure?’ Chrissie scolded him when she met me and Archie and her brother Callum coming home on the path. ‘Where are we to store the milk for cheese over there, now you boys are making such a mess?’ But from the way she looked so cheerful and the brightness of her eyes you could plainly see how she rather liked teasing Archie.
Once or twice, I’d watched Chrissie and some of the girls catching puffins with long snares among the burrows of Dùn Island, but the puffin harvest was a mere entrée in the St Kildans’ diet.
For the next two weeks, the island took on an atmosphere of expectation and focus as each man, woman and child got ready for the fulmar harvest – the birdmen’s equivalent of a reaping of the fields and a harvest festival. If there were not enough birds put by, then the people risked going hungry in the winter, cut off from the mainland by stormy weather that might go on for months on end.
Chrissie and the women fetched the cattle down from the summer shielings in the Great Glen since there would be no time to walk over there and milk them each day. They spent long hours into the simmer dim of evening light grinding enough corn to last them through the next two weeks. Neil and the rest of the boys fetched out barrels and the sacks of salt laid up ready in the cleits and stacked them by the rocks.
All week the old ones clucked over the ropes and went with the men to examine the cliffs and decide who would be given which stretch of rocks to harvest according to their strength. I was touched to see the gleam in Finlay’s eye as he parsed the guano-wreathed ledges among the grass and skeletons of sea pinks, pointing out any changes, the best ways down, longing to still go down himself.
Early in the morning as I came out to empty my pot in the piss bucket I saw the men already gathered. But today there was no leisurely filling of stained clay pipes as they debated between themselves how to share out the activities of the day. The men were speaking quickly, decided in their manners. Even the dogs were caught up in the atmosphere of seriousness and occasion. Every door was open, the smells of a good breakfast of porridge and tea and boiled sea birds drifting from cottage to cottage. The children running up and down in excitement, stirring the mongrel collies and retrievers into more of a frenzy.
Chrissie told us she’d not be in to help for a while. ‘August the twelfth tomorrow, the day the men will set off for the rocks to collect the fulmar chicks and we will all be busy.’
I woke to see a line of small figures on the hillside, following the path towards The Gap and the cliffs beyond. Others were heading west towards the Cambir, some towards the far slopes of Conachair. Behind them were groups of women with heads shawled against the brisk summer wind, the children and dogs following.
Men had set off to cull the birds from the cliff since Neolithic times. Looking out at the sweep of hillsides, I could almost hear a whispering of hundreds of unseen feet setting off across the grass, all come back to join in with this one day on the island.
Chrissie was coming out of her cottage door, the red scarf tight over her head, her feet bare, a clutch of small ropes in her hand and a cloth with provisions tied inside. I ran to fetch my notebook and pencils, hauled my camera on my shoulder and set off behind her, treading where she trod as I knew she would pick out the best path but try as I might I did not catch up with her until we had breasted the slope leading up to the cliffs. At the top, the sea was a disc as wide as the edge of the world in a vista of unparalleled light and dazzle.
The first man had already gone over the cliff edge. Lachie Gillies was sitting on the turf at the top with the rope twice round his shoulder and chest, one foot braced against a rock, carefully letting out the rope, two dogs patrolling up and down behind him. A tall boy, Angus MacKinnon, stood to one side, watching, waiting for his turn to go down, looking over at me as if to say, what do you think of us now? On the other side stood old Finlay smoking, gauging the level of skill in the operation so far with a discerning squint to his eyes.
I was seeing the true kernel of the Kildans, the cragsmen, the birdmen. I sat down as close to the edge of the cliff as I dared.
Chrissie was standing on the turf a yard from the edge. Behind her the hazed blue of the sea and the endless dome of sky so that she seemed to be a thing of flight, suspended in air. She wore the short dress that all the island girls wear, her calves and feet tanned, her bare arms in a cotton shift tucked into her skirt. The red kerchief was tied to the basket she had brought up, her dark hair blown by the wind. She held a hand over her eyes to shield the gold of her face then turned back full of excitemen
t and called out, ‘Do you see? The hills of the long island are as clear as clear. Even the white specks of houses on Uist. And look, you can make out the hills of Skye sharp as teeth. It’s a rare day to see so clearly.’
I went and stood beside her, not looking down to avoid the weakness in my legs from contemplating that drop of over a thousand feet down to the waves, and then something happened – for the fear left me. Standing with Chrissie’s hand on my arm, following her pointed finger with my gaze, I saw what she was seeing on the horizon. I could even make out the distinct colours in the mountain slopes of Skye, the differing shades of blue and turquoise and cobalt. ‘Like drinking the champagne of the skies up here,’ I told her. She looked at me awry and said, ‘Well, we don’t know much about drinking champagne, but we know that there is no better place to know the beauty of the world our Lord has created.’
‘I’ll bring you back some real champagne one day,’ I told her. ‘Then you’ll know.’
‘Then you’d have to go away from here, and why would you do that?’ she said, her eyes mischievous, and I swear she let her hand linger on my arm for a good few moments more than was necessary.
Standing by her, I thought, but isn’t that the truth, that I would like more than anything to stay here in this day, with Chrissie, barely educated as she was, unworldly – guilelessly superstitious as if the last war and the twentieth century had never begun – and wise and glowing and alive and beautiful as the land around us? Nothing I would exchange for this moment, close by her, the sight of her brown tanned face and her clear blue eyes, her mischievous intelligence, and the sweet, sweet smell of her, of warm wool and peat and the grassy green of new cut hay and yes, a smoky hint of the sea birds and the fish that seep through every pore of this place. All the health and the beauty and the magic of that place distilled into the girl that was Chrissie.
I could not make out the details around her, here, or there in London or Cambridge, nor could I envisage any type of life that I could live here in such an isolated spot, and yet I saw her there, wherever I went, the centre of my future, my wife. I can tell you that it was a revelation that hit me out of the blue and made a nonsense of all I knew. St Paul on the road to Damascus could not have been more changed, or more certain, or more blinded by his thunderbolt from the skies.
She went to stand by an anchor man who was setting himself up along the cliff edge, Angus. He’d banged a stout wooden peg deep into the earth and fastened the rope to it, his foot wedged against a rock and the rope heavy around his shoulders. Donald, his feet bare but clad in his everyday trousers and shirt, had the other end around him, let himself over the precipice and began to disappear.
‘You’ll see better from over the way,’ Chrissie told me and I followed her around the curve of the cliff where we could watch Donald walking down the rocks as unconcerned as if he were going to buy a newspaper along the street. He pushed with his feet from time to time, swinging out from the cliff and landing lower down in a slow, graceful ballet, bare feet alighting off the rock ledges, the rope some two hundred feet long. Below him, a thousand feet more down to the sea, a rock skerry with a ruff of deep turquoise water breaking prettily against its sea-worn indentations like a flower on the sea. To fall, to hit those rocks, would mean certain death.
He was working on a ledge now, inching forward towards a narrow outcrop thick with scruffy nests, drapes of white guano runs fringing the rocks below. A row of huge fulmar chicks sat unguarded by parents who had left to glide out towards the Arctic sea, these smaller relatives of the albatross never more at home than when riding the wind over the ocean, only dipping down to scoop up the sand eels and herrings, digesting the rich silver treasure into a slurry of oil-rich goodness in a special gut sack. It was this oil that swelled the chicks with layers of fat ready to face the harsh times of fending for themselves. The chicks were now twice the size of their hard-working parents, swathed in a cocoon of white down with little nibs of black beaks and eyes.
The trick was, Chrissie said, to catch the chick unawares before it could draw back its wings and spray foul stomach oil over the cragsman. Donald soon had a row of chicks hanging from his belt. He pulled on the rope to climb back up and unload them, the rope shortening as he climbed.
‘You can help now,’ said Chrissie as Donald unloaded his tutu of birds and I wondered for a moment what she meant as she held out a short rope to me. Laughing. ‘Don’t worry, we would not let you loose on the rocks. Your feet are too tender.’ She showed me how to rope the legs of a few birds to each end of a short rope, the wings hanging like hopeless prayers, and then hang it around the shoulders so that the bulk of dead birds was easy to carry. They were not as light as one might imagine, loaded with all the goodness the parents have been able to sluice down them in fishy oils. These birds would pay the sacrifice of being the main sustenance for the islanders during winter. Mrs MacDonald was helping squirt the ruby-coloured oil from the bird’s beaks into a drum.
I caught up with Chrissie as she headed down the slopes. ‘If the ladies in London could see you now, Chrissie, with your stole of fulmars, they’d give up those dead-eyed fox furs they wear round their necks and all want one like yours. Why don’t you travel a little, to Glasgow, or down to London one day?’
‘Me? All those people rushing round in their fancy clothes and those motorcars in the streets. I’m Chrissie Gillies from Hirta. This is where I belong.’
‘Chrissie, you are a wonder. Honestly, if you could only see yourself, so pretty with your feather cape and your blue eyes. And you smell of the wind.’
She looked at me with a mixed expression, annoyance that I might be making fun of her – and hope that perhaps that it was a compliment.
‘Oh, you do nothing but talk your nonsense. And I smell a lot better than you do.’
I turned my head to give a quick sniff to my armpit region. She had a point. And after that she was hard to keep up with as we went up and down the hill all day, carrying the birds. The sun shone down unabated, though a cooling wind made our work easier as an impressive pile of white birds grew on the platform of flat rocks down by the sea, a bounty contributed to by all the teams, and waiting to be divided between the families.
I stayed for a while and watched how the boys and the women were already taking off heads and feet, transmuting the creatures from birds to wing-shaped food. Some of the older women sat nearby on stools, plucking in a storm of down. Finlay MacQueen was gathering the down into canvas sacks. He shook his head as he opened the bag wide to let me see the treasure.
‘Good enough for a bed for the old queen. And she’d not get any fleas in her bed with fulmar down. It’s the oil that keeps the fleas away. But no one but us wants our feathers these days. Was a time too when the world wanted a bottle of fulmar oil to ease their aches and pains. You should take some too, Mr Lawson. If you run out of electricity, it’s excellent for a lamp. I wove all this tweed I’m wearing by the light of a fulmar oil lamp.’ Finlay stood tall so I could admire his workmanship.
‘Oh, sit you down, Finlay, and shut up. Why should the young man want to take a bottle of our oil all the way to London?’ said Allie MacCrimmon.
‘I’d love a bottle to keep,’ I insisted, though I had no intention of surprising my friends with a nice fishy reek in my rooms. ‘Why don’t I run and get a glass bottle to put a little in?’
I stoppered the bottle tightly lest any of the odour escape, and sat it in the bothy window. The low evening light lit up the reddish oil, my own bottled spark of ruby sunset. I pictured it on the sill of the mullioned window in my college rooms, a little foreigner in civilization, evening light illuminating it like a shard of stained glass, and there, in the background, in the shadows of the room, I saw you, standing in my rooms in Cambridge with your gentle smile.
I had a lot to write up that evening after a day in the company of the last true hunter-gatherers of the British Isles – at least in the way of men who must hunt in order to put food on the table rather th
an as sport. The St Kildans never take so many birds that the population cannot replenish itself. In truth, it was the birds that had the power to do away with the people should they ever choose to stop coming here.
But once again, my notes wandered off once into a long passage on one particular St Kildan. Chrissie.
I put down my pen, rested my head in my hands.
I saw myself back in the common room in Cambridge again, the fellows there pulling to pieces the cant of our tutor Canon Edgington. I tried to place Chrissie there, but all I saw was the confusion on her face as all the brutal speeches of truth that we’d learned from the terrible years of the war beat against her ears. I saw her clasp her hands over them and the tears of pain in her eyes. How cruel would it be to do that to her?
Chrissie, my love, I thought. I can never tell you just how much I love you, for I could never give you a future. And when the boat comes back, I will go and leave you here where you are happy.
I gave up on work and lay on my bed, the last of the light glinting in the bottle of oil, and from outside the plaintive cries of seals on the skerry rocks uncannily like the calls of lost children.
CHAPTER 22
Fred
ST KILDA, 1927
Archie decided he’d go and see for himself how the fulmar harvest was progressing. He was part of that set who liked to hunt and stalk, up for the challenge of bagging a few birds even without the aid of a gun.
‘But listen, Archie,’ I said as he left that morning. ‘You’re to stay in one piece and come back and do your essay. No heroics now.’
He gave that wicked little grin.
I watched him set off with the boys, a faint harr of mist across the grass that would vanish as the sun grew warmer, Callum and Lachie listening to Archie’s prattle, clearly in awe of him, though he was the one going to learn from them; the boys in their old and well-worn tweed trousers, double patched at the knees and shoulders against the rubbing of the guide rope and the edges of the rock face, their feet bare; Archie in his plus fours, a tweed jacket slung over his shoulder, a white shirt freshly laundered by Mrs MacKinnon. They were joshing together, crowning Archie with the coil of rope. I saw him take out his hip flask, a quick sip, holding it out for the others to join him.
The Lost Lights of st Kilda Page 13