The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  Christmas was hardest, not a word from our loved ones. We had our New Year service warmed only by the gas sconces in the walls, the weather outside black and howling. As soon as the minister opened the door for us to walk back to our bothies, the wind tore it out of his hand and smashed it broken against the wall.

  By January, we were living on thin oat gruel, eking out the salted fulmar. Ewen Ian came by with a little wooden sheep he had carved for you, Rachel Anne. He sat solemn by the fire, and said that if it weren’t for his mother and the old ones then he would go tomorrow if a boat came by.

  ‘Don’t say so, Ewen Ian,’ my mother told him. ‘Come the spring we will recover as we always have.’

  He shook his head. ‘We are too few and too alone.’

  We were left more shaken by his words than by any storm. We had never had such a silent supper.

  We ran low on paraffin so that we had to weave by the light of the smoky fulmar oil in a cruachan lamp, which we had mostly consigned to the byre for many years, and which gave a poor light for the eyes. Mother and I took it in turns at the loom since we were a house of women now. I pushed the shuttle to and fro, dreaming of potatoes hot with butter, of bacon and bread, of sweet biscuits and hot tea with a sugar in it.

  I was in the schoolroom one afternoon, searching for a book I might read again, when I heard voices through the open door into the church. It was the nurse speaking with the minister’s wife. She was fretting at how much sickness we had had in the village, wet eczema and bad chest infections. Little Kirsty with the TB.

  ‘They have low herd immunity with their poor diet,’ the nurse said. ‘They need fresh food to give the children a chance. They refuse to admit it and leave but I fear St Kilda is dying.’

  I replaced the book quietly and tiptoed out, but my heart was going fast, filled with anger at what she’d spoken. Angry with the truth of it.

  Hungry, depressed by our isolation, we were in our beds with influenza when the Nona struggled through a storm to bring us our Christmas letters. We gathered around the captain, coughing, wrapped in our shawls and blankets, and such lists of provisions from all sides – not that most of us had the money to pay for it. He promised to take a message to the world of how badly the island was faring so that the government might send us some mercy aid, and return with more supplies.

  But while we waited, the thing that we fear most arrived. Mary Gillies, who was expecting her third child, was taken to bed with appendicitis. Nurse Barclay did all she could but she said that it was a hospital was needed to save Mary. No radio mast, no boat to go for help, what could we do?

  It was only by chance that a Norway drifter came by, wanting to shelter from the storms. We watched Mary as she was rowed out to the ship, wrapped in a shawl and waving to her children.

  She died in the Glasgow hospital and the child with her. The illness had gone on too long for them to save her. And after Mary died, we were a broken people.

  CHAPTER 37

  Chrissie

  ST KILDA, 1930

  The end of a terrible winter. Nurse Barclay had finally understood why the children had saved their sweets, and how empty our meal chests were. She asked all the villagers to come down to the factor’s house. In her front room she had a white cloth on the table, and she made us all tea, boiled almost black, the way the old people liked it. She had sugar for the tea. She had jam from Glasgow. All the things that came over on the boats now that the winter storms had eased up. The MacKinnon children were eating fast.

  No shortage of supplies now. Tea, jam, paraffin. Shoes for the children. But all come too late, for after Mary’s death we were defeated. When the nurse asked us how we had fared that winter past, and to speak our minds about what we thought, we were quiet. But then MacKinnon, who had the eight children, said that if he could leave, then he would go now, but since he was a man without money, then what could he do to pay the passage? The tears running down his face.

  Nurse Barclay took the big brown teapot and poured out another cup for those that wanted it, saying, perhaps there was a way, that she could find help from the government. ‘It seems to me,’ she said, ‘you have reached the end of the road and for the sake of the children you must give up the island, but before I ask them, you must make the decision to go.’ No one spoke. We listened to the roaring of the peat fire as a turf brick took the flame.

  Then Ewen Ian and Tormod said they too were ready to leave. And one by one, the people said yes, we would leave the island, Nurse Barclay’s kind, antiseptic words guiding us to make the right decision. I turned you to the window so that you did not become upset by the men and women openly weeping.

  And in the gloom of a cold and heavy mist, the men gathered in the village street next morning, the strips of dark rigs waiting for the seed potatoes to be planted. But the men agreed together: they would not plant them now. When the autumn came, there would be no one on the island to harvest them.

  Only Neil Ferguson was seen out on his croft, digging the rigs over ready for planting. ‘I leave my house only when I leave in my coffin,’ he told us.

  It was Reverend Munro who wrote a letter petitioning the ministry to help us evacuate the island. He read it out and we each of us signed. Old Finlay MacQueen made his mark since he had never learned to write.

  The government minister came to see us, shocked, he said he was, by the poverty here. He told us we must learn to earn money each day. They would give us jobs planting trees, though we had never seen a tree. And as to how the evacuation would be paid for, then we would pay for it, by the sale of all our cattle and our sheep.

  They told us there would be room on the boats to take only what was needed for our new lives. Not the barrels for salting the birds over winter, not the gins and fowling poles for snaring gannets and fulmars on the wet cliff edge, not the dresser or the table made by my father. None of the heavy bits of furniture could be given room on the boat. Not our own front door with the long history that went with it, nor the white mist pouring down over Oiseval or the wide bay with the dish of shimmering sea at the foot of the green slopes. All the looms were left behind. And we felt it deep in our stomachs, how we were leaving all the things that had been our livelihood, but we trusted to the future, a future none of us could imagine except in stories of electric lights and cars and trees.

  Suddenly, there was a great deal to do if we were to leave before the winter closed in again. The beasts to fetch down ready for loading on to the ship. The washing of blankets and readying of clothes so that the people on the mainland would understand we were a decent people and not vagabonds who lived on charity.

  Each evening, the old ones reminisced of times before the stone pier was built, before any steam trawlers or whaling ships called by, travelling back to days when there were a hundred or more people in the village, the mothers over on Boreray catching puffins, the fathers scaling the cliffs of the great sea stacs of Stac an Armin, bringing home thousands of gannets. A time when hardly anyone on the island spoke English and money was a foreign idea from the mainland.

  The reverend invited us in to the manse to listen to the wireless and the evacuation being debated in Parliament, old Finlay asking me to translate. One man said it was a shameful thing that in all the British Empire across the world, the only place that should need to be evacuated was here in the British Isles. Another man wanted to know what would become of the old and destitute of St Kilda, if they would have to be sent to a workhouse or some other institution. But the government minister told him the St Kildans care for their own. We were shocked by the mention of a workhouse and hardly reassured. And we heard how four hundred people had written to the government to ask if they could settle on our island after we were gone. They were all to be refused.

  So many tourists came that last summer, avid to photograph us, like beasts in a zoo, shrouded about in the tragedy of our almost starvation. They wanted souvenirs, spinning wheels, old lamps, grinding querns. ‘They can smell St Kilda is dying and are sca
venging on the scraps,’ said Finlay. But he put a cruachan lamp and the last of his stuffed birds in his window, a notice beside them I had helped him write: For Sale. Souvenirs of the simple race.

  And we felt it, how we had become such a spectacle. One of the newsmen brought a camera to make a film of our last days. But we had seen enough pictures of ourselves through their eyes, looking poor and backwards. All he got was us hiding and covering our faces, running away along the village street, or old Mrs MacDonald taking her spinning wheel back inside, shaking her fist, too besieged to come back out all day even to fetch a cup of water from the pump, her pride stronger than her thirstiness.

  Three shepherds came from Uist with their long crooks to work out how much our sheep and the cattle were worth to pay for the evacuation and get them down from the hills. But St Kilda sheep do not flock for the sheep dog but must be coaxed from their rocky haunts one by one. Our dogs are trained in this way, which would be bad for our dogs when the time came. The Uist shepherds watched as we went up to do the ruaging. The sheep were taken away then, loaded into rowing boats and taken across to the Dunara.

  Our dear cows were next, the old folk in tears to see their friends go who had been with them for so long. The poor beasts were tied to the back of the rowing boats and had to swim across the bay to the Dunara, winched up in a hoist, and it was empty without their lowing, the birds and the wind now free to make all the music of the island.

  Our last week on the island and a letter from the post office arrived. They had finally agreed to pay for a lighthouse ship to deliver our mail in the winter. But their aid had come too late.

  There were a dozen newsmen came on the tourist boat that last week, wandering over the island with their notebooks, getting in the way and peering through windows. They had to sleep lined up on the school floor. The Admiralty packed them off down to the jetty and sent them away with the last load of sheep. We still found one fellow hiding in a cleit behind the factor’s house with a crate of provisions. I recognized Mr Alpin MacGregor from The Times, hoping to stay and write a book about his life as a Robinson Crusoe. He was sent to help Neil Ferguson with the sacks and sacks of mail that had come, asking for a St Kilda stamp or a gannet wing for a duster or a length of tweed. He and Neil were up till the small hours sorting through it. We saw the newsman rowed out to the boat with the sacks first thing.

  The reverend and Mrs Munro and their bairns and Nurse Barclay were the first to leave in the village. We embraced and cried and stood as one on the jetty and the shore as the Dunara left with them small on the deck. I held a book that Mrs Munro had given me, and with it an invitation to visit her one day in their new parish but I never did make the journey there. After that, we worked to load our possessions into the rowing boats to be taken to the Harebell, bundles and kist chests roped to our backs, lamps held aloft through the small hours of the dark, trying not to see the windows in the manse and the nurse’s house which had no lamp inside to light them any more.

  We slept little, our last night as one, in a place where you might go into any home for help, the doors never locked. Now to be cast into new lives scattered far apart in places we could not imagine.

  My mother and I made worship in the morning. Along the village street, each home left the family Bible open on the table at the chapter of Exodus. Next to it, a dish of oats for any passing traveller, or for when we might return. We each banked the peats and left a fire burning, though we knew that by tomorrow the hearths would be cold. For the first time in hundreds of years, there would be no homely fires warming the hearths on St Kilda.

  The first time we had locked our front doors. All the village out in the street now, silent. No sound of dogs barking; the men from the ministry had rounded up all the dogs and had them drowned in the bay since they could not learn the ways of mainland dogs.

  One last time walking across the island together to say goodbye to the places that were part of us. A long time standing by the graves we were leaving, by Father’s stone deep in the iris leaves.

  ‘I still do not understand why we must go,’ old Mrs Gillies said as we waited on the jetty. ‘It is but the work of despairing Sassenachs.’

  We were rowed out to the ship, the line of bothies growing smaller, Mother holding tight to the spinning wheel she loved.

  All on deck now, looking back at the hills, when we felt the vibration of the engines thrumming under our feet. The land began to move away from us, the bothies and the manse growing smaller until we were out beyond the bay and the sheltering arm of Dùn. We tried to hold the bothies and the chapel with our eyes but they slid behind Oiseval and vanished. Slowly, gradually, the island grew smaller and faded until it was nothing but a blue shadow, dipping below the sea. Then a wail went up from the people, for we saw the island was leaving us. The sailors turned to the wind to hide their tears at the sound of the women’s sobbing. For the sun still made a silver road home, dancing with sparks of light, but we would not tread that way again. We had no rights to go back, for the island was to be given over to the birds.

  At Lochaline, we had not imagined there would be such crowds to greet us. We were taken away in motor cars, going in different directions, people standing on the running boards to see us better as we moved slowly through the crowds. I saw men on bicycles, stared back. We’d known about cars, but no one had told us to expect bicycles.

  That first night in the cottage in Morvern, I slept not a wink, missing the sound of the sea and the birds settling at dusk.

  I had stayed a moment in the bothy as Mother went out, quickly written in the front of the Bible that we left on the table, ‘We are gone to Larachbeg in Morvern.’ For I did not know how else to let him know. And so I waited, in hope, for him to find us one day. But I never dreamed so many years would go by, and still no news.

  CHAPTER 38

  Rachel Anne

  MORVERN, 1940

  It’s taken several nights for my mother to finish her story. I sit on the rug, arms around my knees, staring into the peats. She’s close by to me and reaches out to stroke my hair. I feel myself flinch away from her touch.

  ‘And you never found out where he went, Fred, I mean?’

  ‘I tried. I even wrote to Dunvegan in the end, a letter addressed to Archie. It was a long time before anything came back. Archie was indeed working in Paris, a lawyer for a shipping company. He hadn’t heard from Fred in years. Archie wrote back to say he’d tried to trace him, but with Fred’s only relative, Lachlan, passed away, there wasn’t anyone left who Archie could contact for details.’

  ‘And you’ve never spoken to Fred since that day he left the island?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And he’s not had any news from Archie?’

  ‘Not that I know of. I’m sorry, Rachel Anne.’

  ‘So he really has no idea that I exist, no idea that he has a daughter, a grown daughter, whose entire childhood he’s missed? Why did you make him go away like that? Why did you drive him away? What have you done?’

  I can’t bear to be near my mother any more with all she asks of me with her secrets. I run out into the night, letting the door bang hard. More solace in the cold wind and clouds bright with moon and frost than in my mother.

  She has her memories of the island and of my father. I have nothing.

  I walk until I am almost falling with fatigue, stumbling on the rough places on the road when the moon goes in. I turn and head back in the darkness.

  CHAPTER 39

  Chrissie

  MORVERN, 1940

  She’s gone, filled with accusations and hurt, and I’ve no answer for her. I sit with my hands clasped hard together, trying to feel the warmth of the fire. It’s a story I never wanted to tell.

  Perhaps she is right: I am to blame. If I had never loved Archie so much once, if I had not let him walk with me and get so close, then surely he would not have pressed and expected things that day. Got into such an anger with the drink in him when I pushed him away.

 
I hadn’t known about Archie’s lie about me until later, when Archie told me in a letter and asked me to forgive him. But was it my fault too that Fred went away? I’d told myself that if I truly loved him, then I must let Fred go and finish his studies – and when they were done he would come back to me.

  But sometimes, in my darker moments, I wondered, was it my shame rather than my love that had made me push Fred to leave?

  CHAPTER 40

  Fred

  MARSEILLE, 1941

  A brisk day outside, the wind like a knife off the sea as I walked with Archie to the American Embassy. Archie seemed more businesslike, focused on the job in hand.

  At the end of Rue de Forbin we came out onto the wide promenade of la Joliette, the masts of boats swinging in the wind like a winter forest, weak sun on the water, the spires of a cathedral on the hill across the bay. No red banners as in Paris, instead posters of Marshal Pétain, or ones declaring ‘Vive La France’. The pavement cafes were open, doing good business in spite of the chill, crowds of people flowing past each other on their way to work or on morning errands.

  Archie was right about the queues at the embassy, a line already curving around the hall, but he soon managed to get us to the front, sorted out the cards without problems. He asked me to wait while he popped in to see someone. I suspected that he was here to do business of one kind or another. A while later, he reappeared, walking at speed. I followed him as he strode out.

  ‘Thought we might have a drink somewhere.’