And so to this book, which I have put together with my friend, artist Doug Robertson, who, for all his origins on Scotland’s east coast, now lives in the far south-east of England. Despite the distance between us, there is little doubt that our imaginations spark off one another, often as if we were occupying the same small room. There are times when we make suggestions to each other, improving and sharpening our original ideas. His drawings help me to develop my own ideas, and there is little doubt that my writings do much the same for him. There are occasions when we draw on truths to generate and create our art-work. The last sermons attended by the St Kildans, for example, inspired both Doug’s drawings and my writing. The importance of stone in the life of all islanders has also provided inspiration; these include the cairns erected on cliff-tops for generations by those who dwell upon their shores, providing men with landmarks, making particular headlands look distinctive when they fish near an island’s coast. On a larger, spiritual scale, they even include Callanish and the monolithic Clach an Truiseal on my native isle.
The Guga Stone takes place in the head of Calum Mackinnon, an islander who has been sent to guard the islanders’ property in the years after their departure. There is truth in this. The St Kildans’ homes were indeed vandalised a short time after their belongings had been mainly cleared and doors closed. Someone was sent back to Main Street in a bid to protect the assets they had left behind. Mackinnon’s thoughts veer back and forth as he contemplates various aspects of life in Village Bay and its surroundings. He remembers the departure, the flight and patterns of birds, mainland visitors, the origins of its people and its myths and landmarks. He even (much less realistically) considers the Second World War with its plane crashes, the new life that will come to the island’s shoreline with its Rocket Range, how the natives of St Kilda will survive in their exile as they live out their days on the mainland, how a new generation of visitors – such as the incoming archaeologists, botanists and ornithologists – will adjust to life in a newly refurbished Main Street after decades of these houses standing empty.
Mad? Bonkers? Fictitious? Undoubtedly. Yet, nevertheless, I would argue that there is a kind of truth in the pages that follow. It belongs to the world which the St Kildans and other islanders inhabited, where there was poetry, story, legend and seabirds all around. Mostly, however, it incorporates the spirit of winding up the visitor that was prevalent for centuries in the mind of both the Highlander and Islander – for all that they may or may not have mentioned such phenomena as the existence of the clockwork fulmar or the St Kildan goth movement in their tales.
Read the following pages. Work out for yourself what is – and is not – to be believed.
Donald S. Murray
June 2013
Prologue / Ro-ràdh
AFTER THE FIRST FORTNIGHT, Calum Mackinnon decided it might be better if he stopped talking to sheep and seabirds. He had the notion they were beginning to look at him oddly, as if they were starting to resent the way he kept intruding into their grazing or the manner in which they dipped and dived for fish. Instead, he wandered round the houses of Main Street, drumming at the doorway of each house with his fingers as he passed.
‘Madainn mhath, Iain… Good morning, John…’ he might say.
‘Feasgar mhath, Raonaid… Good evening, Rachel.’
For the first while, no one answered him, apparently preferring the gloom and silence that surrounded them in their homes to any human company. Undaunted, he might sit outside their houses and tell them what had brought him to these shores again.
‘It was after those idiots came here,’ he explained, speaking of how his exile had come to an end. He had been asked to return after a group of fishermen had arrived on the island, shattering windows and smashing doors, damaging roofs, knocking down chimney pots. After all that, some of the sheep and fulmars had succeeded in getting into number 12 and fouling the place. The birds had built their nests where old men and women used to perch for hours, chatting about all that was happening in the narrow confines of the world. He had spent some time cleaning this up, speaking as he did so to a young ram that occasionally felt bold enough to prod its nostrils in his direction; its fear of humans, perhaps, lessened by the fact that there were so few of them around these days.
‘I never knew people could act like that when I was on the island. No idea at all…’
It wasn’t long, however, before the people in the houses started talking to him again. At first, it was the women peeking out of the tartan shawls they wrapped around their faces, squeezing out a word or two.
‘It’s a fine day, Calum… A fine day.’
After that, made bold, perhaps, by their wives and mothers talking, it was the turn of the men to begin using their voices. At first, they might remonstrate with him. The missionary would quote Spurgeon in his direction, trying to bring his endless conversations to a halt.
‘There are times when solitude is better than society, and silence is wiser than speech,’ he might say, bringing his finger to his lips in an attempt to hush him.
But for all his advice, talk returned to the island, as slowly and determinedly as the tide. It might be Ferguson rambling on about his work in the Post Office, all the people for whom he stamped mail and postal orders during his years behind that counter.
‘They came from all over, Calum. Oban. Glasgow. Edinburgh. Even America…’
Or others talking about how they had lost sons on the cliff-faces, trying to capture the seabirds that still reeled above his head like those from his own household who had died near the rock they called the Mackinnon Stone. They were the ones who had coped. They were the ones who had survived in this place.
Slowly the tales and verses began to echo, the words he had heard in all the different houses he visited on the island…
Departure / A’ fàgail Hiort
Sphagnum Moss
Sphagnum moss remembers. It recalls
the touchdown of each lark that tumbles
down upon its surface, the slightness of that weight
recorded in the tendrils of each stem. It anticipates
the appetites of flocks which graze
upon that wasteland when the rare haze
of summer-heat crisps heather.
The constant tide and toll of weather.
Snow concealing peat and turf like surf,
rolling in with weight of dark clouds curving
around the bleak horizon. The persistent smidge of rain
blurring that land’s muted shades year upon damp year again.
And, too, the heavy trudge of boots
which used to stamp upon it in pursuit
of sheep or cattle. Or else stumbling back
homewards just before the black
of night consumed the borders of a bog
stretching wide before soles, the perils of a loch,
perhaps, where a neighbour drowned. Sphagnum moss,
above all, stores the footsteps of those who are now lost,
those residents and denizens of moor
for whom moss feels an absence, their drum of feet
no longer pounding desolation like a heartbeat any more.
Accusing Stone
One of the men bent to clutch
stones to fire at the camera recording
the disorder of their leaving,
granting them no chance
in privacy of grief
to gather their belongings,
make their last peace with home.
And now over the decades,
a single, angry stone
wings from that direction
to crack the lens
allowing us to watch
again
women concealing faces
behind shawl or tweed
in their need
to conceal expressions,
MacQueen trying to outface it
with his defiant stare,
the pace of native feet
&
nbsp; as they try to outrun history
the length of that island street.
Mackay’s Last Sermon
After visiting the homes on Main Street,
Mackay’s mouth was awash with the best Lipton’s tea,
that brown liquid swishing round his tongue
while he preached on Exodus that morning,
the fine words of his sermon flowing
over the heads of worshippers till he spoke
of the Red Sea parting,
when the dam of teeth gave way
and, complete with grains of tea-leaves,
that sweet infusion spilled from lips,
gushed from throat,
trickled from his finger-tips,
till flooding down the aisle,
it swirled around his pulpit,
swept up an unused baptismal font,
the bowls used for collections,
and Gillies and Mackinnon took
the polished wood of pews
and hammered out a vessel
that sailed through the open doors of kirk
sending him into exile,
out the mouth of Village Bay.
The Day They Were Leaving
The day they were leaving, the islanders carried most of their belongings with them. There were trunks packed with clothes to lower into the vessel that took them from its shores. Tables and chairs were trussed up and tied together. Bedding was folded into the drawers of a cupboard and stuffed into jute sacks. The cuckoo and grandfather clocks given to one of the households a few years before was wrapped in a blanket, taken gently and precariously to a safe place in the hold.
The day they were leaving, the islanders kept some of the items that were most precious to them in their close possession, near to the touch of their fingers, the warmth of their skin. Catriona held, for instance, the love-tokens a mainlander had given her tight within her shawl. There was the brooch the shape of a seabird that – he had said – had been made for her by a silversmith in Fort William. She had placed it in the envelope he had sent, telling her about his life in the small village to which the islanders were going.
‘I am a woodcutter,’ he had written, ‘and am very good at using an axe and a saw. I bring down the tallest and thickest trees faster than any other man around. I would help you by bringing wood for your fire and you would cook fine scones and oatcakes above the flames. You would also make soup, potatoes and fish for me when I come home from working on the trees…’
Not having any idea what the tallest or thickest tree might look like, Catriona was much puzzled by the letter. How did he like his fish to be cooked, she wondered, for she had rarely eaten or prepared it in all her days? On the odd occasion her mother had put one on her plate, she had thought it a pale and tasteless thing, not like the wonderful flavour of the seabirds she loved and relished. And so she sat in the boat, worrying how she could ever make a proper wife for him or any other mainlander. She seemed to be absolutely hopeless at any of the work she would be required to do.
On the day they were leaving, she nestled down beside her brother, Iain, on the boat that took them from the island. He was thinking of those possessions he carried with him in the haversack that hung around his neck. Among them was a scrap-book crammed with bright pictures of amazing birds that Neil, one of those who had left a few years before, had sent him. There were illustrations of the bright and dazzling creatures Neil claimed people captured and cooked on the mainland. Among them was an enormous bird they called an ostrich. Wide-eyed and wondering, Iain took in its long, two-legged stride, huge neck and ugly head, the clutch of feathers that trembled on the tips of its wings and backside.
‘How are we going to catch it?’ he asked himself. ‘And when we do, how will we wrestle it to the ground? How long, too, will we take to pluck it clean of feathers before we can cram it into a pot?’
He pictured himself and the other islanders gathered outside the walls of the corrugated-iron roofed cottage he imagined his new home on the mainland might look like. There would be a flurry of black and white feathers clouding their world from the breasts and backs of the giant birds stretched before them. In its fog of plumage, it would be like the mist that often covered and concealed the island, obscuring its high cliffs and crags from view.
And then there were all the other birds Neil said existed on the mainland. The pterodactyl with its sharp and jagged beak; the little black emu that scurried around the place, dipping its beak again into the earth; the peacock with a thousand eyes dotting its magnificent tail; the duck-billed platypus that had neither wings nor feathers (Neil had never explained how it might manage to fly). All their bright and dazzling peculiarities jostled in his head like some fantastic aviary, one that he contemplated again and again the day that they were leaving.
Among the other items they held in their possession that day was a Bible that fell open at the pages of the book of Exodus each time Neil’s father Fergus raised it in his hand. He had studied its text so often, hoping for some divine revelation when he looked at his favourite passages, words that told him they were doing the right thing by sailing from these shores and anchoring on the edge of this new world whose visitors and emissaries had already brought ruin to the one that was warm and familiar to him. No light or knowledge ever came, however. He read each chapter and verse about the land which the Jews had been promised by God without any real understanding. It was as if the mountains of the mainland had already cast their shadows upon him, allowing none of the sunlight that glinted on the bay that stretched out before his home.
The day they were leaving, Fergus also brought with him a fulmar feather he had found upon his doorstep that morning, cramming it in his pocket as he headed out the door for the last time. He twirled and furled it round his fingers, wondering if he would ever again touch any part of the bird he held most precious in the world. He had heard it said they were not plentiful on the mainland, that the cliffs and crags of the place they were heading for held few of their number, if any at all. For all that he tried to hide it from his wife and children, there were times when he felt hopeless about the bleak and barren mainland they were sailing towards.
The day they were leaving, his other son, Calum, held in his possession something he had kept wrapped in an oilskin cloth and wedged into one of the island’s walls for many years. It was a picture of the woman a visitor had called the Black Venus, the French dancer Josephine Baker. She was crouching in a small dark room and brandishing two large, white feathered fans. They concealed much of her body, revealing only her naked shoulders and the sweep of her calves and thighs.
‘Perhaps the feathers come from some of your birds,’ the tourist who had given him the card had joked.
Calum doubted that. He had examined the card for ages before concluding they were unlikely to have come from, say, a gannet’s wings or breast. They were too large to have originated even from the plumage of that great bird. For all that he experienced a little disappointment about this, this feeling jostled with hope. He wondered if there were many women on the mainland who wore feathers like Josephine. Though he was aware the thought might be sinful, he hoped the day might come when he would see one of them, preferably at a time when a good strong gale was blowing, puffing each and every one of the feathers away. Nervously, he chuckled as the idea occurred to him. Tapping the picture with a finger, he hoped that his father would never find it in his pocket. For all that he was almost a grown man, he was aware that the old man would whip him raw for the offence.
The day they were leaving, the islanders carried many of their most important possessions with them; a postcard from a relative exiled on the mainland; a letter featuring the promises of a civil servant in Edinburgh about what would happen when they arrived. For one, it might have been a button that spun loose an hour or so before the boat was due to sail, leaving no time for anyone to sew it on his jacket. For another, it might have been the pipe tobacco he brought with him at all times, ready for a qu
ick puff and smoke. For Mairead, it was the lipstick she had been given some years before, yet never had the courage to put on while she lived upon the island. Perhaps, some night after she arrived on the mainland, she would finally see its shade upon her skin, drawing a bright red circle round her wrinkle-puckered mouth…
Most of all, though, they brought the memories of the home they were leaving; recollections of the sound and sight of the seabirds that reeled around its crags and cliffs; the seals that sometimes popped up their grey heads in the bay; the feel of island stone on their fingers; the brush of moss and lichen growing upon its walls; the mist that sometimes trailed across each dip and slope, bog and summit; the immensity of the sky that stretched above them on still days; the storms that kept them imprisoned when wind and weather lashed their homes; the miles of sea that fringed its coastline, dividing them from the places to which they were now being taken on this – the day they were leaving its shores for the last time…
Preparing for Departure
/ Ag Ullachadh
Volcano
They began to talk about leaving on the morning they were told by a visitor that Conachair might one day erupt like Krakatoa or Vesuvius, places they had been taught about at school. They looked at the plume of low cloud covering its crest and decided that he might be right. Someday steam could leak out of a long forgotten peat-bank near its summit and come creeping down its slope, lava trailing in its wake. Heat and fire would roll down and destroy each wall and cleit in its path, heading towards the houses in Village Bay. Some could even catch a whiff of sulphur in the steady, persistent rain. The smell reminded them of a time and place the missionary kept mentioning in his sermons
The Guga Stone Page 2