Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  I am not suggesting that John Murdo or any of the others is indulging in heathen practices. Nothing could be further from his mind. It is just the way it has always been done here. And it fits the place. If this is an inherited pattern, it is entirely unconscious.

  The sun had come out and we were looking over the lambs gathered in the fank beside the house. The lambs were not quite as good as everyone had hoped.

  Nona: It was the wet spring that did it.

  Toby: That was what kept them back.

  Nona: Aye, and the dry summer.

  Toby: Aye, that would have kept them back too.

  Nona: And it’s been cold these last few weeks.

  Toby: That wouldn’t have helped.

  Nona: No, they’re not as good as they might have been.

  Toby: But there are some big ones in here.

  Nona: Monsters some of them.

  Toby: There’s some good lambs in there.

  Nona: Look at that horned ewe with her twins.

  Toby: There’s some very heavy lambs here.

  Kennie: It’ll be heavy work getting them into the dory.

  Toby: Come into heel, will you.

  Nona: Once you get a good year, you expect a good year every year. It must have been ’98, was it? That was a corker. But you’re not going to get that quality every time.

  Toby: No, not every time, that’s right.

  As the shepherds looked the animals over, we had some visitors. The grey-hulled, thirty-eight-foot ocean-going twin-diesel estate boat from Eishken on Lewis, the Incorrigible, pulled into the bay and off-loaded its passengers, about eight handsome men and women, in their late teens or early twenties, in fleeces and sunglasses.

  John glanced up from his work. ‘Oh, they’re from Eishken,’ he said. ‘They’ve been here before with their black labradors when we were trying to get the sheep down off the big island. They had their dogs on the beach and I had to shout at them to get out of the way because the sheep wouldn’t come down. You’d think they might have guessed.’

  In the sunny afternoon, as we worked at lifting and drenching the sheep, the people from the boat came and sat on the grassy bank a hundred yards or so from us and watched. None of them moved towards us, nor did the shepherds greet them. Instead, we spoke quietly amongst ourselves.

  John: Look at them. Look at them lying there like that. There’s no reality in their lives. You slog your guts out on a day’s work and then you see them there and you realise you don’t have the first idea how the other half lives.

  Nona: Toby, you’re the one for the girls. You go and talk to them. You’re the one who nearly cut that head off that sheep at the clipping when that girl in a miniskirt came along with some eighty-year-old husband or other and you very nearly slit its throat open.

  Toby leans against the side of the fank with his bum outstretched in the direction of the Eishken party.

  John: Each of those sunglasses probably costs more than I get for a day’s wages.

  Nona: At least they could come and say hello and have a look at what we are doing.

  Toby: Yes, but they probably think we are going to rape and murder them.

  Nona: We could hold them to ransom.

  Toby: How much do you think? It’s diamond money, isn’t it, at Eishken?

  Adam: No, I think it’s nightclubs, tenpin bowling and Burger Kings in the north of England.

  Suddenly landed in this piece of class drama, I thought I should go over to them.

  ‘What are you up to at Eishken?’ I asked the ranks of silvered wraparounds.

  ‘Probably drinking too much,’ one of the boys said. A girl said she felt like climbing a hill and so I pointed out the way up the side of Garbh Eilean. She thanked me but didn’t move. Was it shyness that was hobbling their behaviour? God knows what we looked like, covered in sweat and sheep shit. I later heard from someone at Eishken that the party had been told that shepherds were working on the Shiants and they weren’t to interfere with them. And so they lay back and enjoyed the sun. This is the kind of accident by which moneyed gaucheness becomes intolerable arrogance to those who are exposed to it.

  John, Toby, Nona, Kennie and I put the holding pen up on the beach while the Eishken boys and girls watched from just above us. Eventually, having visited ten yards or so of the islands, they sloped back down to their dinghy, which had been brought into the beach by one of the Eishken estate staff. ‘I’ll think I’ll climb a smaller bump tomorrow,’ the girl said as she walked past me.

  Christopher Macrae, the head keeper at Eishken and a good friend of John Murdo’s – his brother, the fisherman Ruaraidh Macrae often brings John out to the Shiants in his boat, the Astronaut – appeared and they waved and said hello to each other warmly. But that warmth did not extend to the passengers. Macrae’s assistant in waders was holding the dinghy in the shallows. One by one the girls and boys climbed in and sat down, so that with their weight the dinghy grounded on the cobbles. The employee had to push like a Number Eight in a scrum to get them off. John Murdo watched in silence. ‘Even if they had been properly stuck,’ he said to me quietly, ‘they would have sat there and let him struggle.’

  We went back to the house. The Bitch from the Bagh was causing a rumpus in the holding pen and in the excitement of sorting it out, Spot nipped Nona in the bottom.

  We got up at five the next morning. It was still night and you could just see the breakers in the sea outside, creaming in from the south-west. The fishing boat from Ness was expected at seven and we scraped around getting ready in the darkness. Most of us ate a breakfast by candlelight of black pudding, sausages, bacon, bread and butter but John Murdo was too nervous. The wind had got up in the night and he was worried we weren’t going to get off. He was taking two hundred-odd lambs to market, four thousand pounds-worth if the prices came good. That was the reason for no breakfast.

  In the first light, we drove the sheep down on to the beach. The wind was wet and frozen. The boat from Ness arrived and its aluminium Russian dory, with hurdles on both sides, came into the beach. Its shallow draught bow just nosed against the shingle. We made a human chain from fank to boat and handed the heavy lambs down one by one. A man stood in the bow of the dory and we lifted the animals in to him. He held them tight against the hurdles with his knees. It was hot work and even in the cold of the wind we were down to our shirts in it, with the braces of the waterproof trousers up over them and sweat rolling down our faces. The lambs struggled and kicked but we held them at the hips and under the chin, exhausting and relentless work, tons of lamb transferred from shore to dory. They were taken out ten at a time the couple of hundred yards to the fishing boat standing off in the rising wind. There they were lifted up again, over the gunwales and on to the deck. Some of them kicked to get away. ‘Ah, you bitch,’ Toby would say as they flung out at him and the stones of the beach clattered around us. The tiredness grips your whole body but particularly in the ends of the fingers, which ache with exhaustion. Each of the tups needed four of us to carry it, one at each corner. ‘The angry bitch, he’ll have your knees if you don’t watch it,’ Nona said.

  ‘Look at the size of that lamb,’ Toby said. ‘You could go to sea on that lamb.’

  ‘That’s one for the freezer,’ Kennie said.

  ‘Get your hands out of your pockets,’ John said to me at one moment, as we were waiting for the dory to return for another load. This is not a luxury life.

  At last, they were all on. The big fifty-eight-foot fishing boat was down at the bow with the weight of animals on its deck and in its hold. The shepherds lay collapsed on the piled nets in the stern, smoking roll-ups. Someone produced some cans of lager. ‘Nectar,’ Nona said.

  ‘I don’t know we’ve had this many passengers on her before,’ the skipper of the boat said in his wheelhouse. Next to the ruddiness of the shepherds the complexions of the fishermen looked grim and industrialised. ‘I wouldn’t dream of having anything to do with sheep myself,’ the fisherman said to me, smoking
on his chair behind the wheel, his feet up on the desk beside it. ‘It’s all manual labour, isn’t it?’

  The deck was getting slithery with the muck of two hundred lambs. The ones from Eilean Mhuire were to blame. We had picked them up directly from the island where they had been grazing all night. The others had been kept in the fank and were dry. As the big fishing boat, drawing six feet at the stern, headed out into the still Minch, the skipper looked at his cargo with some distaste. He had seen waves out here, he told me – we were now in the Stream of the Blue Men, looking this morning as neat as Hyde Park – as high as the mast out of the wheelhouse. ‘We had to crouch down to see the crests out of the windows,’ he said, ‘and it was coming in, great lumps of water coming down below.’

  John Murdo was painstakingly picking his way through the lambs, checking that none of them had slipped and fallen, suffocating under the others. He had lost three or four a year or so ago like that, and found them dead under the others’ bodies. They were chucked overboard. I scrutinised the other shepherds and myself. We looked as if we had returned from another world: all the wool caught in the velcro of our jackets; our hands brown and greasy from the wool and the shit; our faces creased and tired; our bodies smelling of sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep; and, hanging over it all, a certain air of triumph.

  14

  IN THE WATERY LIGHT of autumn the abandoned buildings on Eilean an Tighe, which in the mid-eighteenth century had housed the forty-odd inhabitants of the Shiants, are softened. Drops of rain hang on the blades of grass sprouting from their walls. One of them is flooded. Rushes and flag irises grow inside its single room like a salad in a bowl. In the spring-time, frog spawn thickens the water in the shadows. Now it is dark and dank. Other ruined houses, on higher ground, are drier and the sheep graze up and over them, along the tops of their wide walls and inside on the turf-covered floor, mowing them as carefully and tightly as a barber with his clippers, but the walls bow and stones fall out of them and the buildings are sinking back into the place.

  It would have been different in the early nineteenth century. The old island community had disappeared in about 1770 and time would have had little opportunity to muffle and subdue the deserted houses. They would have looked raw and cold, empty eye-sockets in a bony skull, with the nettles on the muck heaps and the silverweed coating the derelict gardens. The islands would have been littered with reminders of the old ways of doing things. A single family had been left behind to look after the stock. They probably lived down on the shore, near the present house, the beach and the sweet water of the well. To them, the islands must have felt empty and diminished. Evening after evening, talk must have turned to life as it once was ‘when we were young’, ‘when the others were here’. It isn’t difficult to imagine the circumstances. Life was arduous without friends or neighbours. The women and children had to struggle with the boat on the beach, with the spades in the ditches and ridges of the lazybeds, with anything going wrong and with the limitations of their own company, with no contact or friendship outside the constrictions of the family circle. Life on the Shiants, which for centuries might have felt like a blessing, would now have been like a prison. It was like a cloud closing over the sun.

  In those early decades of the nineteenth century, the Shiants were exposed to a regime of callousness and stony-hearted brutality which is still remembered in Lewis and Harris. It is the first time in the islands’ long history that individuals with identifiable characters emerge on to the Shiants’ stage and the drama they act out is one of harsh economic facts, deprivation and cruelty. But the period is drenched in irony. Just as isolation and loneliness were making the Shiants a kind of hell, the first dreamy-eyed travellers from the south were coming to see the islands as a vision of earthly beauty. As the place became difficult and empty for the Hebrideans, it became beautiful and empty for outsiders. In the summer of 1803, James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, a poetic autodidact from the Scottish borders, wrote to his patron, Walter Scott, from a ship lolling in the Minch:

  I remained on deck all night. The light of the moon at length prevailed. She hovered low above the Shant Isles, and shed a stream of light on the glassy surface of the sea, in the form of a tall crescent, of such lustre that it dazzled the sight. The whole scene tended to inspire the mind with serenity and awe, and in contemplation of it I composed a few verses addressed to the Deity …

  While viewing this scene with amazement and wonder,

  I see Thee in yonder moon’s watery gleam.

  Even Hogg admitted these lines were ‘sea-sick’. He got no closer to the realities but in about 1815, John Macculloch, the geologist, landed on them. At first he fell in love:

  They are verdant, being entirely covered with long rich grass; offering a delicious solitude, if suns would always shine and seas were always calm. If the Highland sea-fairies had been desirous of a maritime kingdom for themselves, I know not where they could have chosen a better.

  But then he visited the one shepherd family on Eilean an Tighe, saw people clearly in crisis, and was revolted.

  We paid a visit to the shepherd, whose house we found, like that of all his countrymen, little calculated for elegant retirement at least; his arrangements, as usual, being such as neither to allow him to enjoy the advantages in his reach, nor to ward off the evils to which he was exposed. We turn with disgust from filth and darkness, and the more so when they are not necessary, when they might be avoided or remedied: nor is it easy to feel, argue as we may, that happiness, that any other happiness at least than that of a hog, can be found in the midst of privations and inconveniences, which the slightest exertion would remove. Turning from the loveliness of nature, from the bright sand and the fair rock, the enamelled green turf, and the sweetness of the summer breeze, it is difficult to view these things without a feeling of somewhat like anger at the barbarism which is placed amidst bounties and beauties that it will not enjoy.

  Cleanliness and order cost nothing. His floor need not be of mud; it need not, at least, be a collection of hill and dale. Nor need the outside be a collection of pools, and rubbish, and dirt, through which he can scarcely gain access to his door. His windows may admit more light, and light is a standing enemy to disorder and squalidity.

  The lease of the Shiants, and of Pairc with which they were included, had been taken by a group of new men from outside Lewis, led by Lachlan Mackinnon of Corrie near Broadford in Skye. One of Mackinnon’s partners was his brother-in-law, the Reverend Alexander Downie, the minister in Lochalsh. James Hogg had in fact stayed with Downie on his tour, lapping up his ‘excellent board, and plenty of the best foreign spirits … Besides the good stipend and glebe of Loch Alsh, [Downie] hath a chaplaincy in a regiment, and extensive concerns in farming, both on the mainland and in the isles, and is a great improver in the breeds both of cattle and sheep.’

  He was, in other words, the sort of fat, laird-friendly minister against whom the church radicals would rebel in the middle of the nineteenth century. Three of the isles to which Mackinnon and Downie’s improvements were to be applied were the Shiants. Their manager there and in Pairc was Donald Stewart from Perthshire, who in 1816 became tenant himself, and after him his two brothers, Alexander and Archibald.

  The Stewart brothers are remembered throughout Lochs and Harris as horrible villains, handsome, arrogant, said to be descended from the royal Stewarts of Scotland. As Angus Smith of Lemreway heard it from Donald Mackay of Kershader, who had heard it from Uilleam Maol Donhnaich, known as Lodie, of Caverstay, who died in the 1950s, aged ninety, ‘They were strong people and always wore the kilt. If they heard of anyone who had a reputation for being strong and tough, they had to see them, because they thought that they themselves were the strongest and toughest.’

  ‘No, they weren’t of the best, a bad, bad crowd,’ Hughie MacSween said when I asked him. That response to their name is shared all over the islands, a retraction in horror from their memory. ‘You would not believe what was done here,’ Mary Ann Mathes
on, John Murdo’s mother said to me at supper one day. ‘You would never believe what they said and what they did.’ There is no sense here of wallowing in a picturesque history; only revulsion at wickedness.

  The brothers and their servants lived in a fine stone house at Valamus, on the south-east coast of Pairc, nine miles or so from the Shiants, a beautiful place on the Eishken estate. I have been over there in Freyja and the ruins of the Stewarts’ house, barn and quay, tucked in at the head of its own small loch filled with seals and otters, sit among their lawns and gardens in a vision of completeness and comfort. On a summer evening, you can hear a cuckoo in the surrounding crags and daisies grow on the deer-nibbled grass. It was from here that they dominated their world, keeping the lease of the islands and Pairc until 1842. Under their aegis most of the townships of Pairc were cleared and the people driven out to the villages of North Lochs and Balallan. The cleared area is now the Eishken estate. Its emptiness was the work of the Stewarts and their successors as tenants of the Pairc Farm.

  ‘Valamus was the first to be cleared in Pairc,’ Dan Macleod, the weaver and merchant seaman from Lemreway told me. ‘It was the most fertile township in Pairc and once they had that, they began shifting people here, there and everywhere.’ The Stewarts were big men and, Dan says, telling me this two centuries after it happened, as though it happened yesterday, his brows opening and closing with each turn of the story, a light coming into his eyes as he reaches the climax,

  if they saw a well-built man, they would challenge him. One time, they had a strong bull, a very wild Highland bull. They were evil people. They invited a strong man to come and see them from the local village. ‘You better go and see the new bull,’ they told him. They got him into the building where the bull was kept and when they had got him in there, they shut the door. They heard the rumbling going on. And of course inside the bull was going for him. But he got a spade and with the spade he managed to get up on to the rafters. Then everything went quiet and they thought he was dead. They left it for a moment, to be sure, and then opened the door to see where his body was. As they opened the door, he walked straight out. ‘Well,’ he said to them, ‘if you want to make any use of that bull, you better bleed him first.’ No, they were very evil.