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My first sight of Shetland was a lighthouse sliding by the window and green lawn slopes falling from rock outcrops, everything fresh and clean, touched with the luminosity of evening light. The Highlander landed and I saw the remains of old wartime buildings as we taxied in to park beside a large British Airways helicopter. There was a light drizzle falling, and as I stood waiting on the apron for my baggage, the smell of the grass and the sea all about me, I had a deep sense of peace, something I hadn’t felt for a long time.
Most of my fellow passengers were oil men returning to the Redco rig. For ten minutes or so they filled the little prefab terminal with colour and the babble of their accents; then they trooped out to the waiting chopper and in a buzz-saw whirr of engines and blades they were lifted up and whirled away. Suddenly everything was very quiet, only the rattle of crockery as a woman went round the tables collecting empty cups, the murmur of voices from the BA desk where the despatch clerk was talking to the crew of the Highlander. There was an Ordnance Survey map on the wall. I got myself another cup of coffee and stood looking at it, refreshing my memory based on the Shetland charts I had pored over on the bridge of Fisher Maid.
Sumburgh Head is the southernmost point of the whole island chain, the tip of a long finger of mountainous land jutting south from the main port of Lerwick. The distance by road looked about 30 miles. A voice at my side said, ‘Can I help you?’ He was a small man in blue dungarees, dark-haired with bright blue eyes and a ruddy face.
‘I want to get to Hamnavoe,’ I said and pointed to the little port, which was at the north end of the island of West Burra, a little below Lerwick, but on the west coast.
He ran a car hire business, but when I said I couldn’t afford to rent a car, that didn’t seem to worry him. ‘Hamnavoe.’ He shook his head. ‘Don’t know anyone going to Hamnavoe. You’ll have to go to Lerwick first. There’s a bus in the morning, or maybe I can fix you a lift. Either way it means staying the night.’ And he added, ‘My wife can fix you bed and breakfast if that’s any help.’
His name was Wishart and I stayed the night with them, in a small house above Sumburgh village with breeze-block outbuildings in which he kept his cars. He had been a mechanic servicing local farm vehicles until the oil companies started drilling off Shetland. ‘Now I’ve got a real good business, not just tourists, you see – it’s all the year round, oil executives, contractors, technicians, commercial travellers. We’ve never known it so good.’ His face was beaming.
‘Yes, but how long is it going to last?’ his wife said quietly, and behind her words was the experience of hard times.
‘Ah!’ His eyes glanced quickly round the neat little parlour with its gleaming new furniture and bright chintz curtains. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’ We had finished the meal and were sitting drinking whisky out of a gin bottle. The whisky had a strong peaty flavour. ‘You being from Aberdeen, maybe you know the answer to that.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m a trawlerman.’
‘Trawlers, eh? You looking for a job up at Hamnavoe?’
‘Maybe,’ I replied cautiously.
‘It’s a lot smaller than Lerwick, you know. You’d do better in Lerwick.’ He poured himself another finger of the pale liquor, topping my glass up at the same time. ‘Only this morning I rented a car to a man wanting to get hold of a trawler cheap – something to do with one of the rigs. But there aren’t any big boats up here, only peerie ones, and there’s none of them going cheap. Anyway, the fishermen here, they hate the oil companies. They’re scared of what could happen. The Torrey Canyon was bad enough, but suppose one of these production rigs blows? Particularly if they strike oil to the west; then all of the Shetland fisheries could be destroyed, millions of tons of oil polluting the seas for miles around. That’s what scares them.’ He looked at me, his eyes very bright. ‘Dangerous bloody game, anyway. Trawling, I mean. There’s just been one of them wrecked, went ashore yesterday in a north-easterly gale. Skipper dead and two of the crew injured.’
‘The Duchess of Norfolk?’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. Drifted into South Nesting Bay … Hear they beached her in the East Voe of Skellister. That’s all right until another north-easter piles the seas in. You mentioning Hamnavoe reminded me of it. The skipper came from Hamnavoe. Now what the hell was his name? Not a Shetlander. Norwegian, I think. You ever been up to Graven?’ And when I told him I had never been to Shetland before, he nodded, staring into his glass. ‘An old wartime base, like Sumburgh here. But bigger. They had seaplanes – Catalinas – and a big airfield. And Scalloway, that’s where the Norwegian boats were based after they moved from Lunna, landing men and arms in Norway, bringing refugees out. I was only a peerie boy at the time, but my Dad was up there. A blacksmith, fixing armaments, all sorts of odd jobs.’ And he went on to talk of his father, the stories he had told, until it was almost midnight and his wife chased him off to bed.
It rained all night. I could hear it drumming on the slates. But in the morning the sun was shining, a magnificent view of sea and rocks and greensward, all sparkling in the freshness of that early northern light. I left with the post van that had brought the mail down from Lerwick, the washed brightness of land and sea calling to something deep within me. We passed under Ward of Scousburgh, Mosey Hill and Hallilee, the road dropping down to the sea, vistas of blue water stretching away to Bressay and the Isle of Noss. It was all new, an island world, yet I felt at home, and the remoteness of it seemed suddenly to cut me off from all the rest of my life. It was a strange feeling, and I sat there beside the postman hardly saying a word.
He dropped me about three miles from Lerwick, where the Scalloway road came in from the west. ‘You won’t have to wait long. Anybody will give you a lift.’ A breeze had sprung up, a cold little wind from the north. I lit my pipe, watching the red van disappear. I was alone then, the hills all around me, sheep noises and the sea down in the valley. Would anybody at Hamnavoe remember my father? I didn’t even know when he had left the place. My mother might have been able to tell me, but I hadn’t written to her in years, and anyway she was dead now. She had never been to Shetland, never talked to me about his early life.
A builder’s truck loaded with breeze-blocks took me to the outskirts of Scalloway, where the road to Hamnavoe turned off to the south along the placid waters of the East Voe. A small drifter was anchored under the castle, sea birds lying to their own reflections, and I could see water stretching away beyond the bridge that joined Tronda Island to the Mainland shore. I was there about twenty minutes before a tourist gave me a lift into Hamnavoe. It was lunchtime then. I bought some biscuits and cheese, left my bags at the stores, and strolled up a grass track to sit on a bank below some cottages. A purse-seine fishing boat was coming in round the headland, another moored at the concrete pier, both of them wooden-hulled and painted black.
The woman in the stores had told me there was nobody of the name of Randall in Hamnavoe now. She had said something about a plaque in the church, but when I went there after my lunch, it was locked. There was no pub and the few people I met had never heard of him. It was the teacher up at the school who suggested I talk to Miss Manson, an elderly spinster living at Brough, about a mile down the road towards Grundsound. But the wind had backed westerly and it was raining then. I found lodgings in a little house on the hill that had a Bed and Breakfast sign in the window and was full of children. It was a bleak place looking north to a scattering of islands half hidden in the rain. The man was away at sea, the woman uncommunicative, and the radio blared incessantly.
As darkness fell I walked down to the pier. But there was nobody there, the two fishing vessels silent and deserted, and Hamnavoe itself a dead place wrapped in a wet blanket of low cloud. I was walking slowly back, my head tucked into the collar of my anorak, when a shaft of light shone out from a cottage doorway and a voice said, ‘You the stranger been asking about Alistair Randall?’
‘Yes,’ I said, and he invited me i
n. He was a beaky, tired-looking man with thin white hair and a nervous blink to his eyes. The door closed behind me and I was in a cosy little room with a peat fire. A little old woman, very plump, sat in her knitting chair, the needles clicking, bright eyes watching me out of a round face that showed scarcely a wrinkle.
‘My wife,’ he said and I was conscious of an atmosphere in the room, an undercurrent of strain. ‘Mrs Sandford knew the Randalls.’
She nodded, an almost imperceptible movement of the head, the knitting needles clicking away and her eyes fixed on me with a strange eagerness.
‘Can you tell me about Alistair Randall?’ I asked.
Her eyes dropped to her knitting and there was an uncomfortable silence. Her husband smiled at me blinking his eyes. ‘He was here all one summer.’
It was very warm in the room and I unzipped my anorak. ‘You did know him then?’
The knitting needles stopped, the room very still, and she was staring at me again. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
I hesitated before replying. Since leaving the Fisher Maid I had been using my mother’s maiden name of Fraser – just in case they tried to follow me. But now … ‘My name is Mike Randall,’ I said. ‘Alistair Randall was my father.’
The sound of her breath was like a sigh and she nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I see now – the eyes, of course. We did wonder, Albert and me – when we heard you had been making enquiries … That strange eagerness was back in her eyes as she gazed up at me. ‘From America, aren’t you?’
‘I was brought up there. I left when I was twenty.’
She seemed disappointed. ‘But your mother … She went out as governess to a rich business man and then married him. During the war I think.’
‘Yes, during the war.’
‘Muriel.’ She nodded. ‘Her name was Muriel. Is she still alive?’ I didn’t say anything and she turned to her husband. ‘Give Mr Randall a chair, Albert. And a glass of whisky to keep out the damp.’
She asked me a lot more questions then, about myself and what I had done with my life. ‘So you didn’t come to see me?’
‘I came to find out about my father.’
‘Did you know I wrote to your mother?’
‘No.’
‘It must be three or four years ago now.’
‘She shouldn’t have written like that,’ her husband said, his voice gentle, almost apologetic. ‘I told her not to.’
‘Life hasn’t been easy for us,’ she muttered angrily. ‘Both of us getting old now, and Albert hasn’t worked in twenty years. It was my son insisted I write. Did your mother never mention I had written to her? Mrs Graber, Bay View, Narragansett, Rhode Island, USA. That’s right, isn’t it?’
I think she must have written to her for money, and because she was disappointed that I hadn’t come to Hamnavoe in answer to that letter, it took time and patience to get her to talk about my father. Her husband hardly said a word. He was from Scalloway and I don’t think he had ever met Alistair Randall. But she had virtually grown up with him, for the Randalls had had a small farm at Houss on East Burra and her eldest brother had kept a lobster boat down in the Voe of North Houss. ‘Alistair often came out in the boat with us.’ The softness of her voice, the faraway look in her eyes … I sensed there was something more, but all she said was, ‘He was a very wild boy.’
He had gone to sea at the age of fifteen, on an inshore boat fishing out from Hamnavoe. Then his father had died, the farm was sold and his mother had gone to live at Easter Quarff, which was where she had come from. ‘I didn’t see him for a long time after that. He got a job on a Lerwick drifter. And when the Shetland Times printed his views on the working conditions of the island drifters he started writing for the papers regularly, you see.’
She produced some faded cuttings from her work bag, and while I was glancing through them, she told me how he had shipped in a Danish cargo boat bound for Svendborg and hadn’t come back for a long time.
‘Did he go on to Russia?’ I asked, for the last of the cuttings was about whaling in the Barents Sea.
But she didn’t know. ‘He only spoke of Denmark and Norway. Oh, and Finland – he had been to Finland.’
‘How long was he away?’
‘Almost three years.’
‘And then he came back to Lerwick?’
‘No, to Hamnavoe. Of course I was married by then …’
‘But you saw him again?’
She glanced across at her husband, a smile that had a quality of sadness. ‘Yes, I saw him again.’
‘Did he talk about Russia at all? He was a Communist, you know.’
She shook her head. ‘No, he never talked to me about Russia.’
‘How old was he then?’
She paused while she worked it out. ‘He was a year younger than me, so he would have been twenty-three.’
That made it 1930, for he had been born in 1907. I asked her how long he had stayed in Hamnavoe. ‘Just the summer, that was all. He was writing most of the time – a book, I think. But I never heard it was published. And he was gone before winter. He was a very restless man.’
‘Was that when he went to Aberdeen?’
But she wasn’t sure. ‘I never heard from him again – only at the end.’ She delved into her work bag again, an envelope this time. She held it out to me, her small hand trembling slightly. ‘It was because of this I asked Albert to bring you in. I thought you must be a relative, you making enquiries of him here. He will have written it just before he was killed. You can read it if you like. I don’t mind.’
The envelope was dirty and torn and it had no stamp on it. The address was in pencil, barely readable. Mrs Anna Sandford, Hamnavoe, Shetland. The letter inside consisted of two sheets of ruled paper taken from some sort of notebook, a thin pencilled scrawl that had obviously been written under great tension. It was headed ‘Somewhere outside Madrid’ and dated February 25, 1939.
Darling Anna –
We are cut off and being shelled to hell. We have held on now for twenty-eight weary months. Not much food and bitterly cold. The Communists have pulled back, our flank exposed. Tomorrow or the next day I shall probably be dead. In these last hours I think of Shetland, and of you. There’s not been much of happiness in my life, and what little there has been I had with you. A pity I ever left the islands, but a man’s destiny lies in himself and is unavoidable. It has led me inevitably to Spain where we have played out the overture for a new world war, the bright hopes of youth lost in this mess of blood and cordite.
You may think it strange that my thoughts are with you now and not with my wife. But Muriel is a realist, whereas you are the essential woman, the Mother Earth of my native islands. God keep you, and Shetland, in peace during the holocaust to come. I pray for you as I hope you will sometimes pray for me.
Your loving
Alistair
I read it through twice, trying to visualize his circumstances at the time of writing, crouching in a trench on the crumbling perimeter of Madrid. And the writing, so overcharged with emotion – the Highland half of him crying out for pity. For prayer, too.
I looked across at the woman so still beside the fire. ‘My mother said he used to write poetry.’
She took the letter from me, staring down at the two faded pages. ‘During that summer … Yes, I suppose it was poetry. It didn’t rhyme and I didn’t understand it, you see. So he never showed me any more.’ Her eyes were beginning to weep and she turned away, stuffing the letter back into her work bag. ‘One of his brigade brought it more than a year later … That was just after our troops had been evacuated from Norway. He was an RAF sergeant then, stationed up at Graven. Brought us some sugar, too, didn’t he, Albert?’
Her husband blinked and nodded. ‘His name was Pettit. A kind man.’
‘We were very short of sugar, you see, and with a growing boy …’ Her voice trailed away. ‘Those were difficult times here in Shetland, you know.’ And she began knitting again. ‘It’s for my son,’ she said. �
��He was here today.’ And her husband said, ‘The first time in more than a year.’
That undercurrent again, and as soon as I had finished my whisky I left them, hurrying back to my lodgings while the words of that letter were still fresh in my mind. In the bare little room I wrote it down, I think exactly, and then I went to bed and for a long time lay awake in the dark thinking of his disillusionment and how it matched my own. To die on a battlefield for something you no longer believed in … And his last letter, not to my mother, but to this woman in Shetland. The Mother Earth of my native islands. The call of his homeland perhaps. Is that what we cling to at the point of death?
The only picture I had ever seen of him was in my mother’s sitting-room in the big house on Rhode Island. It had been tucked away in a drawer full of odds and ends, a photograph taken outside the Registry Office in Edinburgh where they had been married. I remember my mother coming in and finding me standing there with it in my hand, the cold, contained fury with which she had whipped it away from me and torn it up. So long ago now that I could barely remember what he looked like, only the eyes, which had seemed to stare at me out of the print, and the fact that he was shorter than she was and his suit crumpled.
The wind blew all night. It was still blowing in the morning, but the clouds broken now and fitful gleams of sunshine. I started out for Brough shortly after nine, walking south along the back of West Burra, the grass all green and the sea sparkling. I found Miss Manson feeding chickens in the backyard of her cottage, a tall gaunt woman with steel-rimmed spectacles and a waspish tongue. The schoolteacher had warned me she was ‘as full of gossip as a cat with kittens’, so I didn’t tell her who I was, only that I was a relative. It didn’t satisfy her, of course, but she couldn’t stop talking – chiefly about Anna Sandford and the dance she had led her husband, running all over the island after Alistair Randall so soon after they were married. ‘And that son of hers – serves her right. He was always a hard boy and now he’s up in Unst and hardly bothers with them at all … Well, there’s little of Albert there, you know, the poor devil.’
North Star Page 3