The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  The Shetlanders have always had need to spread out to work their land with any hope of success. Even now the population inclines towards crofting – a small flock of Shetland sheep (famed for their wool, miserable to eat), a cow or four or a little posse of pigs, or those eponymous waist-high ponies. These living crofts with their white walls and twists of smoke humanise the bare hills. Those that are crumbling, roofless and derelict are reminders of how hard it was to eke an existence here when sea and disease, uncaring lairds and the allure of emigration even to the ends of the earth always threatened to suck the music from the islands. On a summer walking tour, Betjeman wrote, ‘All over Shetland one sees ruined crofts, with rushes invading the once tilled strips and kingcups in the garden. “Gone to New Zealand” is a good name for such a scene, because that is where many Shetlanders go, and there are, I am told, two streets in Wellington almost wholly Shetland.’

  In winter, the kingcups long dead, the croft corpses are more mournful still, though there’s succour for the sheep, sheltering from the wind in the lee of long-deserted byres. But for all that, Shetland is a bright star in the North Sea firmament, drawing in people, money and investment, exhaling music, fish and oil and a distinctively un-insular mindset for an island.

  Shetland’s apartness is more a sense of distance than difference, underscored by that long ferry journey, ploughing north from Aberdeen over twelve hours and 250 miles of swelling sea. Forty years ago James Nicolson wrote,

  The vague concept of a Shetland way of life is difficult to define. Some people maintain that Shetland is basically a Scottish county with an unusual history now largely forgotten, but there are still fundamental differences between Shetland and Scotland, some difficult to pinpoint. There is no regret in Shetland for the passing of Norse rule, and no antagonism towards Scotland for the mistakes of 300 years ago, but there is still a feeling of separateness that is stressed quietly in innumerable ways. For instance, the Shetlanders consider themselves British rather than Scottish, and refuse to participate in the friendly rivalry between Scots and English.

  It all still holds true. In the run-up to the 2014 Independence referendum, many Shetlanders warned that were the Scots to win independence, Edinburgh would attempt to exert greater control over Shetland than Westminster ever has. The Scottish National Party is presented by some as a Soviet-style centralist group bent on bringing the islands into the Holyrood fold, and the Shetland flag (officially adopted by the Shetland Islands Council in 2006) turns St Andrew’s saltire through forty-five degrees, pushing the vertical bar off centre to give it a ‘Nordic’ twist. There was even, in recent memory, a vandalistic craze for scratching out the thistle sign that points the way to Scottish, sites of tourist interest. The SIC (Shetland Islands Council) argued that it should be replaced by a Viking ship, though this was rejected. Perhaps, squaring up to its own aspirations of independence, Scotland fear losing ground. Meanwhile in the Shetlands shortbread, tartans and collectors’ sets of miniature whisky bottles are refreshingly absent. A preoccupation with longships and horned-helmet motifs fills the void.

  ‘This bloody Viking obsession – so annoying,’ a man called Danus Skene, a columnist for the Shetland Times, told me in Lerwick. ‘It would be over the top in Denmark or Norway.’ Danus though regards Britain as a construction as artificial as the Shetlanders’ Viking past, indeed, he says that the consolidation of Scots rule over Shetland and the Act of Union in 1707 were almost simultaneous and part of the same process of the aggrandisement of Britain. Most Shetlanders owe their lineage to the Scots, he points out, and Shetland couldn’t survive on its own. In truth, the appetite for an independent Shetland is weak. Still, Shetlanders have sewn together truths and half-truths in the creation of their own myths.

  And it is a mysterious story. In the eighth and ninth centuries Norsemen settled and displaced or absorbed the mysterious Picts, of whom little is known or left bar their brochs, the squat cylindrical forts or towers that dot the islands, and a handful of twig-like runic scratchings. Whether the Picts were slaughtered, assimilated or fled is uncertain. Quite possibly they metamorphosed over time into the mysterious trowies or ‘little people’ who inhabited the Shetland imagination well into the nineteenth century. Then the Scandinavians imposed their own social geography on the heather-clad hills, lochs and peat bogs, and introduced the Law of the Thing – the custom by which great councils would meet at an appointed place to dispense justice and settle disputes.

  For six long centuries Shetland was, indeed, a Nordic country. The spoken language was a variant of Old Norse, Norn, and with it every rock, stone, cliff and tarn was christened (and what strange names – Unst, Muckle Roe, Whalsay, Balta, Fetlar, the Skerries, Hascosay, Uyea, Haaf Gruney, Clubbi Shuns, Tonga Water, Maddle Swankie . . . ). The old gods were worshipped, the old tunes danced to, and old songs sung. There being so few trees, the Shetlanders imported boats in flat packs from Scandinavia until even the early nineteenth century. When the islanders began to make their own they did so after the old model, and yoals and sixareens, their longboat genes so evident, are still to be found on the hard or at the quay of every Shetland harbour.

  It took an unpaid debt to drop the gale-knocked Shetland Islands into the lap of the Scots. In 1469 King Christian I of Norway betrothed his daughter Margaret to James III of Scotland, a dynastic manoeuvre intended to shore up his hold on the Danish-Norwegian union, but the dowry was dearer than Christian could pay in one sum and he pledged the Shetlands as security. Margaret died on the voyage to Scotland and the dowry was never paid. Some say British sovereignty is only de facto, and that were the florins handed over (adjusted for inflation) the debt would be redeemed. But long before that non-marriage the Scots were sizing up Shetland, arriving in waves to scratch a living from farms in the bare hills. And then came the Stewart earls – still a byword for despotism in Shetland – and the lairds, who obliged their tenant crofters, benighted in the winter months and scarce able to sleep in the surfeit of summer light, to fish for them in return for the right to work the bare and often blighted land.

  The mix is even more cosmopolitan than that. Shetland was firmly on the Hanseatic trade routes, and for generations merchants from Bergen, Bremen and Hamburg brought not only cloth, beer and butter (so difficult to churn from the thin island milk), but links to mainland Europe, which must have seemed so much more real and vital than either Scotland or the notion of Britain. When the Act of Union was signed in 1707 and tax imposed on the Hanseatic trade, Shetland was plunged into depression, earning assistance from neither Edinburgh nor London. But soon came the Dutch in great numbers, both to fish for the herring that could be hauled from the rich Shetland waters and to trade, setting up booths on the quayside by which exotic luxuries could be exchanged for wool, piltocks and mutton.

  ‘We’re no less Dutch than we are Vikings,’ said Danus Skene, who is himself only a Shetlander by dint of a tenuous family link.

  There are no tourist-thrilling puffins in the dark bone-chilling Shetland winters and no midnight sun. That I heard the footsteps of my own fear softly keeping step with my travels owed nothing to the kind, friendly islanders, but everything to a storm, the early inklings of which made landfall a few hours after I disembarked from the Aberdeen ferry before sunrise in dark and solemn Lerwick. Perhaps bad weather is a traditional greeting for writers. When the medical student Edward Charlton arrived in Lerwick in 1832, his ship was refused berth for six days on account of a rumour that one of its seasick passengers had cholera. That first night, as Edward ministered to the needs of the condemned unfortunate, a ‘grit gale’ bore down upon the islands, tearing off roofs and scattering the fishing boats.

  If the ship snapped her cable as she threatened to, Charlton wondered, would the worse part of shipwreck be the dashing upon the rocks or ‘receiving very much rough usage at the hands of the terrified inhabitants, so much [does] the fear of the cholera overpower all other considerations’. In the morning, hungry and pining for dry land, Charlton
learned from a Dutch herring buss that sixty Shetland six-oared open boats were missing. One was later discovered, its crew only half alive, washed up on the shore of Norway.

  I first caught wind of the storm eavesdropping in a small quayside café with green-painted walls and pinewood booths. ‘What kind of storm?’ I asked the waitress as she handed me a doorstep sandwich. Blizzards, she said, and very, very strong winds. The roads would be blocked; there’d be ‘nae ferries runnin’’ and, she added, ‘Aye, it’ll be the old ones that feel the force of it. It always is . . .’

  ‘De saving grace,’ said her colleague, ‘is that you’ll ha’ nae bodder wid fallin’ trees. Nae’ bodder at all.’

  From a hilltop that evening I watched a steady procession of boats seek the safety of the Bressa Sound, and by eight o’clock Scots, Danish and Norwegian fishing boats were all safely hitched to the Lerwick quayside, their crews playing video games and watching DVDs. The supermarkets were busy – there was a near run on milk and booze. Shetland was battening down.

  That night I stayed at the croft of a friend an hour’s drive from Lerwick, the road unfolding like the pages of a book of magnificent screen-prints, land, sea, lochs and islands overlapping in patterns both profound and simple, but now gouged and scoured by wind-driven snow, the storm’s imminent arrival trumpeted by a prolonged lupine moan rolling down the frosted slopes. Even the crows and ravens were struggling.

  It wasn’t until the early hours that the real guts of the storm seemed to suck up the house and spit it out. Bounded but formless, escalating, compressing, it seemed to steal the air from the room in which I lay shrinking beneath the covers in anticipation of some awful blow. It drew tighter and closer and roared until, for several seconds, the very stones of the croft shook and trembled. And then it passed on, witch-like, into the dark hills. Shetland lost no sixareens or yoals that night, but power and telephone lines were down, gardens ravaged, and all flights, both from Sumburgh to Aberdeen and the inter-island service from Tingwall, were cancelled, and would be, foreseeably, for days.

  I headed north towards the oil terminal at Sullom Voe, at which hundreds of thousands of barrels of ancient forest rendered black, viscous and valuable by the passing of millennia arrive each day by pipeline and tanker. At night the terminal sits beneath the flickering reflection of its lights and flares. By day it is almost invisible, tucked behind barricades and fences.

  In the early 1970s the prospect of becoming a hub for the North Sea oil industry hung over Shetland like a cleaver. Islanders feared a descent into hell. The Church of Scotland declared that the Shetlands were being ‘called upon to make an unjustified sacrifice to preserve and protect a society with an insatiable appetite for energy’; in a House of Commons debate a Labour MP said that the islands’ ‘simple gentle people’ would be outwitted by the ‘land-grabbing Mafia of Edinburgh and Texas’. Oil would bring the curses that it had inflicted on so much of the world: corruption, rentierism, the death of traditional industries, prostitutes and drugs. It would destroy fishing grounds and ancient places. Beaches would become accustomed to the floundering of birds, more tarred than feathered in the wake of the inevitable and catastrophic spills.

  Crofters close to areas slated for development feared the compulsory purchase of their smallholdings and fought hard to preserve the tough life they had perfected. Outsiders would come, not for any love of Shetland, but to earn as much money as they could in as short a time as possible. Worse, the islands would be reduced to assets on the books of oil companies in Houston or Dallas. And like the lairds who had had the crofters in their grip for so many hundreds of years, those shiny-suited money men would squeeze and squeeze.

  And the islands didn’t need the money. By the 1950s and 1960s Shetlanders had become well off compared to their forebears. Many had earned good money whaling in the South Atlantic, and after near-extinction made the industry unprofitable, the Leith-based whaling company Christian Salvesen provided grants for ex-whalers to buy knitting machines. The islands’ fishing fleet was making a fortune from the seas around Shetland and a fish-processing industry developed. Oil was seen as surplus to the requirements of a place that had become, like an impecunious aunt rescued by a windfall, accidentally rich.

  So, realising that oil needed Shetland more than Shetland needed oil, the local county council led by a Plymouth Brethren accountant called Ian Clark sponsored an act of Parliament, the Zetland County Council Act of 1974, affirming Shetland jurisdiction over the site chosen for the oil terminal, and establishing a reserve fund to smooth the transition once the oil ran dry. After the act was passed it was presented as a David-versus-Goliath success for the islands, though that interpretation isn’t universally shared: in ‘Natural Causes, Essays in Ecological Marxism’, for example, the writer James O’Connor describes it as a cover myth for ‘the last of Britain’s imperialist ventures’ and maintains that many decisions are made directly ‘by the British civil service and imposed on the people of Shetland on the grounds that they are merely technical-administrative matters and not political questions at all’.

  Yet the oil has enabled Shetlanders to enjoy at least parity in living standards with much of the rest of the country, while the outflow of young adults has been stemmed by new jobs and secondary industries. Oil money has allowed Shetlanders a breathing space to appreciate their own talent for music. And that there are more swimming pools per person on Shetland than anywhere else in Europe is, thanks to an exuberant, possibly misplaced council initiative, all on account of oil.

  A few miles along the cusp of the brooding Voe sprawls the settlement of Brae, a kind of loose conglomeration of huts, cabins and accommodation blocks. It has the appearance and charm of a modern-day gold town. Here live the oil men (and they are men), shipped in to heft, weld and grind, or mustering before being helicoptered out to the rigs.

  I paused before crossing the forecourt of the Nordern Lights. The wind was gusting like a howling Cerberus keeping me at bay (in cahoots with the slippery ground), violently flinging the door back on its hinges each time it was opened. This was an unfamiliar Britain, where brute force and the elements still waged a daily war. And I was afraid of being an outsider among outsiders – the only person in the pub whose reason for being there was not legitimised by the contribution of physical labour.

  In a brief moment of respite I dashed across, seized the door, pulled it hard and made it into the space between the outer and inner doors. Two men were huddled beneath a NO SMOKING sign, smoking. One, a giant, acknowledged my arrival with a courteous nod. The other, a short stoat-like boy-man, looked down at my hands and said, ‘Look at that. Leather gloves! Who the hell are you?’

  I told him about the book I was writing.

  ‘Yes, but what’s it about? The North Sea’s a big place. It’s got to have something in the title hasn’t it? Something like The North Sea: . . .’

  ‘Cold Wet Cunt?’ the giant suggested.

  ‘Or maybe Force for Good and Ill?’

  ‘I haven’t quite clinched it yet,’ I said.

  When two more men arrived for a smoke the subject was opened to the floor. Mother of All Seas was suggested and Travels at the Edge of Despair.

  The tiny vestibule fumigated comprehensively, we went through the inner doors into the pub. The giant headed to a corner table at which some men were singing a song about being made to feel like a natural woman in a gruff-edged falsetto. Otherwise, excluding the barmaid this was a very masculine pub. Loud, rumbustious, brightly lit.

  Danny, the shorter man, offered to buy me a drink because ‘you’re an author and authors are poor. Whereas me, I’m fackin’ loaded.’

  We stood at the bar and tried to speak. Periodically a man in his mid-twenties with short ginger hair and a beard put his arm around Danny and chanted, ‘Da-a-anny! Dan-ny. Dan-ny,’ before being cajoled back to the dartboard to take his throw.

  Danny was apologetic. ‘Oi. Leave it, Brian – this man’s a fackin’ author!’

 
Brian leaned close in to me and gave me a drunken comedy kiss.

  Danny’s life story tumbled out like an overdue confession. His accent was southern – London even – though he had been born in Norwich. He was a civil engineer at the Centrica gasworks five miles from Brae and responsible for all the drainage issues as the plant expanded in size. ‘My job, Tom, is to fackin’ take a bloody shafting from the management every time something goes tits up in this fackin’ dump!’ He mimed being given a shafting, one hand on the bar, the other on his pint, posterior presented submissively to his imaginary tormentor.

  Danny was only twenty-six. He had had an unhappy childhood and a violent father, but pushed himself through an engineering course and found he was very good at it. He’d also been to the House of Commons – and sat on the terrace – having been elected a member of the Youth Parliament when he was a teenager. But he’d been a bit of a flash Harry, numbing early memories with prostitutes and cocaine. All the Soho tarts loved him but only on account of his cash and coke.

  He hated it up here. Waiting for him in a ‘shitty estate near Norwich’ he had a wife and kid. He worried about the effect that being apart for weeks at a time might have on his family life, but at least he was away from the coke and the tarts, and they paid him two grand a week. His ambition was to get out of the estate, ‘where half my fackin’ neighbours don’t even know what a day’s work looks like and just hang out knocking each other up and waiting for their benefits’. When he made some proper money, he was going to get a decent house and move up the property ladder. ‘I’m going to have three houses before I’m forty,’ he said.

  Danny surveyed the pub with a kind of fond pity. In the morning, if the weather didn’t stop work, he’d be ‘bossing loads of these guys around’. The ginger beard stuck his head into our conversation again, made monkey noises and pushed a shot glass full of spirits sunk into a pint glass of Tennent’s in front of Danny, who raised it to his mouth and made it all disappear with a gurgle. He wiped his lips, exhaled noxiously and told me it was my turn to buy him a drink. Then he nearly doubled up, forearms clutched over his stomach. ‘Fack me!’ he said. ‘I’m done for. See you later, mate. I’m going back to die.’ And he headed out, like a spectral cripple, into the screaming night.