by Tom Blass
I had been afraid of this bar, keenly aware of imagined differences between myself and men driven by circumstance, lack of opportunity and government policy to seek a living in the northernmost tip of the United kingdom. Even after forty years of extraction, Sullom Voe remains Britain’s Klondike, a place where money is made not through the regurgitation of fads and fancies or the manipulation of markets but by pitting brawn against the earth.
Here was a potpourri of dialects – Geordie, Scots, London, Dutch – but none local, for the possessors of those had real homes to go to of an evening. Perhaps half of the men present were waiting for the storm to pass; when it had they’d fly out to the rigs on a service helicopter. Their moods were largely determined by the terms of their contracts. Some were being paid a full daily rate for lounging around and some paid nothing at all.
An older man, perhaps in his late fifties, had been listening in to my conversation with Danny, whom he hadn’t met before but in whom he recognised the ambitions of an earlier version of himself. Alan was from Sunderland, had served an apprenticeship in a shipyard and had anticipated leading the life his father had led – secure, working his way up to a skilled and well-paid job with no expectation that he’d ever have to move far from where he was born.
When the Tyneside yards closed, he searched out whatever opportunities he could find. First it was Sellafield and then it was the North Sea – ‘Not on the rigs, mind. You’ve gotta be in the right clique to get a job on the rigs. If you ain’t in a clique you’ll never get on. And who’d want to? You’d go out of your fookin’ mind with the boredom an’ all. They literally befriend seagulls on the rigs, did you know that?’
He turned to a big ex-rigger from Grangemouth for corroboration, which was given. ‘You give it a wee bit of y’ grub every day, and it comes back when it knows the others aren’t looking. Mine was called Sammy. It isn’t a terribly original or imaginative name for a seagull, is it? But you do, you know, go a bit blank out on the rigs.’
Now Alan was a site inspector, a responsible and relatively comfortable job, much of it spent in an office. But the prolonged absences had destroyed his marriage. He described the heartache of having to cope with family crises by telephone, the helplessness of it. ‘But there’s nothing in Sunderland; I hadn’t a choice.’ Alan had also once believed that two decades of graft, and he’d be able to retire with a property portfolio. But his wife had kept the house after the divorce, and now lived in it with another man while he was up in Sullom saving for another. ‘It’s not a great deal to show for a near lifetime of work, is it?’
On the ferry heading up to Shetland I’d shared a cabin with a man called John-James Jameson. John-James was about the same age as Danny but from an old Shetland fishing family. It was natural for him to go into the oil business; that’s what his generation of Shetlanders did once they were of an age to look for work. He’d used the skills he’d acquired to work around the world, spending most of his time in South Korea, where his girlfriend lived, but taking contracts in Mexico, Brazil, Philippines – anywhere there were offshore projects. ‘It’s been great for Shetland and for me,’ he said, ‘but I pity some of the blokes heading up to try and make their fortunes in Shetland. No family life. Living in those apartments or floating hotels. There’s nothing for them to do but work and drink.’
Pre-North Sea oil, the argument had always run that regardless of any other obstacles to an independent Scotland, the bottom line was that Scotland simply couldn’t afford to be free – her economic dependence on England gave Westminster its mandate. The discovery of oil threatened to turn that state of affairs on its head and had given a massive fillip to the nationalist movement, which had returned seven MPs to Parliament in 1973 largely on the back of a campaign headlined, ‘It’s Scotland’s Oil.’
‘The prime minister [Harold Wilson] has asked me to put two thoughts to you,’ his private secretary wrote to the Department of Energy in October 1974.
It may be that the first landing of North Sea Oil in bulk should be the occasion of some kind of official celebration, perhaps even with Royalty present. Would the secretary of state give some thought to this? [And] if the first tankerload of North Sea Oil comes direct to the Thames, the Scottish National Party is bound to use it as an occasion for protesting that this demonstrates all that they have been complaining about: the diversion of Scotland’s oil to England’s pockets. Would it not be better if this first tankerload was unloaded at Grangemouth?
Wilson, aware both of the tenuousness of his own position in crisis-torn Britain and of the nationalists’ growing hold on Scotland’s political affections, had a dilemma. The oil had been produced in the Argyll field in Scottish waters, but the Grangemouth oil refinery at Falkirk on the Scottish coast, the facility closest to the field, was not equipped to receive crude. A second Scottish refinery at Finnart was considerably further away and would necessitate an extra two or three days’ sailing and lost production time. The most cost-effective solution was to land the oil at a refinery in the Thames estuary, but this would ‘in presentational terms [be] in the very least clumsy and give the SNP a field day – Scotland’s oil going straight to London’, according to the prime minister’s private secretary Joe Haines.
Even were the oil companies and operators prepared to do so, steaming the oil around to the west-coast refinery at Finnart would, it was argued by the secretary of state for energy, be ‘a transparent public relations device, and probably unproductive’, given that long-term arrangements for the landing of oil from the Argyll field to Scotland were ‘not practicable’. In the event, it was brought ashore at Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire.
Civil servants pointed out that nationalist claims that Scotland would be ‘better off economically’ were based on dodgy figures and dubious statistics, but the importance of North Sea oil was that it had raised the issue of Scottish independence in a more acute form than at any other time since the Act of Union was passed. The Scots were not Callaghan’s only headache. The oil would bring in valuable revenue, but Britain was so heavily in debt that the proceeds of the bonanza were mortgaged well in advance. The 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher in effect quelled the Scots rebellion, or suppressed it for a few decades while the nationalists mustered their forces. But in the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, North Sea oil, harvested from deep beneath the seabed in ever greater quantities and by more ingenious means, was critical to the Scottish Nationalist Party’s argument that it would be able to afford to dissolve the Union.
In the earliest days of the oil boom the end of the bonanza was already being anticipated. The great Scottish writer Eric Linklater predicted in the late 1960s: ‘Someday the oil will stop flowing and the isles will be left with the land and the sea and the old indigenous industries that have sustained them so long.’ That remains true, but contrary to rumours of the industry’s demise a combination of new discoveries and improved production technology suggest that the oil (and gas) will continue to flow for at least a further three or four decades. Money continues to pour into the industry. At the end of December 2013 a company called EnQuest signed a deal to invest £4 billion into an oil field called Kraken 70 miles off Shetland said to contain 140 million barrels of oil, and though local council spending is being reined in, Shetland lives will continue to be padded by oil profits.
There has however been a heavy human cost. In 1988 a North Sea production platform, Piper Alpha, exploded killing 167 men. It was the first major catastrophe in the industry and threw a painful spotlight on working practices on the rigs. Like the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry sinking in Zeebrugge with the loss of 193 lives, many regarded Piper Alpha as emblematic of the immorality of capitalism, of putting profits before people.
Well into the early twentieth century the lives of Shetlanders were heavily dependent on the sea. It wasn’t a total reliance; from their crofts they scratched a barley-like crop called bere, from which they’d make bannocks, or scones, and a meagre bread. The scr
awny Shetland sheep yielded fine wool and poor meat, but sufficient to salt and dry and turn into reekit mutton, still a Shetland staple, something like confit de canard and served with potatoes in broth and bannocks. Yet it was from the sea that they had come. It surrounded them; each day they negotiated their identity and survival with it, and from it there came an apparently self-replenishing abundance of fish, even close in to shore. James Nicolson noted that the ‘most important of these was the saithe, especially the young fish, called up to two years old sillocks, and between two and four years old, piltocks. The flesh was dark and less inviting than that of other species, but it was the abundance of the shoals . . . that made them so important.’
One of the great merits of the piltock was that women could catch them in the coves with hand-pulled seine nets at any time of the year. In 1806 the traveller Patrick Neill visited some crofters on Shetland, recalling later, ‘I inquired what they generally had for breakfast. They answered, “Piltocks.”
‘What for dinner? “Piltocks and cabbage.”
‘What for supper? “Piltocks.”
‘Some of them declared that they had not tasted oatmeal or bread for four months.’
Old Shetlanders did enjoy other gastronomic delights. At around the same time Edward Charlton arrived at a lodge or
buith to enjoy a true Shetland dinner. Some fresh tusk [haddock] had been brought in this morning and while the body of the fish was boiled the head was converted into ‘ane crappit head’, a savoury Shetland dish, prepared by stuffing that part with oatmeal and toasting it with abundance of butter before the fire. The liver too was chopped up into small pieces, and by a peculiar process dressed much to my taste, constituting another Shetland dish, the ‘Livered Moggie’.
And if times were really hard, there was always a shag to be had, edible after a long soak in spring water to remove some of its gamey saltiness. Seals sometimes made it onto the menu, but were regarded with some ambivalence, on account of their mermaid-ish good looks and soulful eyes, and this often saved them from the pot.
Quite when Norn died out is uncertain. In the late 1700s the traveller George Low met a man who could recite the Lord’s Prayer in Norn, and also fragments of a song that its singer couldn’t understand. In the 1850s a Faroese philologist, Jacob Jacobsen, recorded some 50,000 Norse words in common currency in the Shetlands, but most were place names, and the inhabitants had lost the meaning of them. In the 1970s researcher John Graham could find only a fraction of these again. There’s a consensus that the Shetland dialect includes a few Norn words, but it is in reality no less a variation of English than is Scots.
Place names apart, Norn survived longest in the employment of seafarers, not only to describe its states, but also its animal inhabitants, mythical and real. And, just as among the Hessle Road fishermen, the language of the sea provided alternatives to land words that brought bad luck used away from land, especially when out at the haaf (fishing grounds) – fishing from six-oared open boats (sixareens) sometimes up to forty miles from shore, a wildly dangerous practice even by the standards of the time. It’s possible that there’s a note of rebellion in this stubborn adherence to the tongue of the Vikings. One writer suggested that ‘it is as if freed from the shackles of the land with all its restrictions and subservience to the Scots crown, the fishermen were at liberty to speak the language of their hearts’.
And what words. Dekk or festo was the sea bottom and djup the sea. Gro, gula and gritten were wind words in order of increasing strength. Glub referred to the appetite, either of man or fish – the former might lack it through seasickness, the latter might be presumed to if they failed to bite at the long line. Mareel was the phosphorescence on the sea, murkavi a blinding snowstorm and the mirrie dancers the Northern Lights.
It is a language both practical and poetic, a simple mirror to both the beauty and the exigencies of a hard but subtle life. Forso were half-boiled chewed limpets spat out on the surface of the sea to lure fish. The sands of the beach between the shore and the ebb were sjusamillabakka, a usefully enigmatic reply to a question as to where one might have come across a valuable supply of driftwood.
And if the Shetland bestiary is a little spare in species, it is rich in the means of describing them. For the otter alone there are half a dozen monikers: a dratsi is ‘one that walks heavily’, a drillaskovi ‘one that drags its tail’. Or it could be a lotate, which walks slowly and heavily. The seal, out of the skin of which the Shetlanders once made rivlins – shoes – could be a horin – ‘a hairy one’, or a kogi – ‘a peeping one’. And farmers loved the skooie, or skua, because he scared away the kliksi – eagle – which fed upon their lambs.
The favourite old Shetland phrase of Elizabeth Morewood, ‘Artist, Singer and Norwegian Speaker’, according to her card, is flugga mucka, meaning to beat one’s arms around the chest to warm oneself. The old folk on the Atlantic coast of Norway use it still, she said. ‘It means to shake out your wings like a cormorant.’ In the late 1940s Elizabeth sang for the great ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, pulled out of a crowd for the strength and delicacy of her voice. Ever since early adulthood she has taught and sung, while acknowledging that it is a difficult thing to define.
Shetlanders love music, and the fiddle, which can crank up a dance in a tiny croft or in the cabin of a whaler, is the instrument of choice. In 1743 a violinist called Friedemann Von Steigl jumped ship on Shetland’s most northerly isle – Unst – from a merchantman and never left. Apparently he sparked the fiddle craze, which has yet to die down. Clues as to what came before the fiddle are very scant. There are reports of a two-stringed dulcimer known as a gue played with a bow, a reconstruction of which resides in the Shetland Museum, but like the stuffed ‘dodo’ in the Ashmolean it is largely based on conjecture. In the 1920s a Swedish academic scoured Shetland and beyond for traces of the gue, but an original has yet to surface. Neither has evidence that those traditional Gaelic instruments the bagpipe and the harp ever enjoyed any kind of currency at all. And, said Elizabeth, finding music that predates the post-Norse influx of Scots settlers, Dutch fishermen and German traders is very difficult too.
Elizabeth has been a teacher for much of her long life. Her hair is immaculate, her skin and eyes possess a kind of morning clarity and she had driven ten miles to meet me in formidable weather at formidable speed. I had been told she was indomitable.
‘Which song,’ I asked her, ‘would you say was the oldest?’
‘We-e-ell,’ she said, ‘it would have to be the “Unst Boat Song”.’
And she sang, the melody seeming to float and curl like a silk ribbon falling in a breeze.
Starka virna vestalie
O-ba-dee-a, o-ba-dee-a
Starka virna vestalie
O-ba-dee-a monye
Stal, stoi-ta stonga raero
Whit saes du, da bunshka baero?
Whit saes du, da bunshka baero?
Litra maevee drenghie
Starka virna vestalie
O-ba-dee-a, o-ba-dee-a
Starka virna vestalie
O-ba-dee-a monye
Sanya papa wara
O-ba-dee-a, o-ba-dee-a
Sanya papa wara
O-ba-dee-a monye
Starka virna vestalie
O-ba-dee-a, o-ba-dee-a
Starka virna vestalie
O-ba-dee-a monye
Many of the words, she says, are so ancient that they cannot be readily understood, but coincide with pieces of Old Norse long unspoken in Shetland.
Some days later I met Charlie Simpson at Cunningsburgh, nearly at the southern tip of Shetland. (‘Are you seeing Charlie?’ Elizabeth asked me. ‘A dear, peerie man! I’d poosh him along in his pooshchair when he were a bairn!’) He is retired now, a slight man with an enormous white beard, who plays music, writes books about Shetland and is an inveterate contributor to the Shetland Times.
‘Was it true, what Elizabeth said about the pushchair?’ I asked Charlie.
‘Aye,’
he said, sans smile. ‘It’s true enough.’
We spoke for hours in his little book-lined study – about fishing, gues, the Norwegian influence on Shetland aquaculture, about what would have happened to Shetland had oil never been discovered and most of all about music. And we talked about Tom Anderson, an insurance collector, fiddler, music teacher and composer who died in 1991, but hovers like a giant over Shetland for his rediscovery of its music.
Charlie’s deep involvement in Shetland life was brought home by the number of telephone calls he received during our conversation, which he answered with varying degrees of broadness in his accent. ‘Never retire. Never retire. Not if you want to have any time to y’self.’
Yes, said Charlie, it was possible to talk about a distinct Shetland music. But, he suggested, it wasn’t so much that there was a pure strain trickling as that over time a portfolio of experiences had intermingled uniquely. Shetlanders had travelled so widely – on the whaling ships down to South Georgia and the Antarctic and up to Greenland – been press-ganged into the Royal Navy, caroused with Dutch fishermen. All of these experiences were present somewhere.
We leafed through books of Shetland songs. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘take a look at this. The tradition was that this song was handed down through time by the trowies, the little people – perhaps a folk memory of the elusive Picts or perhaps stranger still. Who knows? But when a German academic came to Shetland some time ago he heard the tune and recognised it right away. “That,” he said, “was the most popular dance tune in Hamburg throughout the 1860s.” So there you are. You never know where you are with what’s “authentic” when identity is concerned.’