Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  The timing could not have been worse. It was Easter – it must have been Good Friday – and all the people were away from Molinginish and Rhenigadale at Tarbert, at the Easter Communion. They were there for several days and there was no one on the shore in Molinginish to see the fire they were making on the beach. And so for days they had to wait there on the islands keeping the fire burning. It was only when they were coming back from the communion, walking on the path that comes over the hill to Rhenigadale and Molinginish, that they saw the light in the Shiants. It was then that they roused people on the shore and took a boat from Rhenigadale out to the islands and found that the lady had died.

  Catherine’s family left with her body in the perfect driftwood coffin and never returned. The urgency of their departure is strange. Donald Morrison did not hear any explanation for it from his father. Why should they have been in such a hurry to get away? Why did all of them leave on Catherine’s death, when none of them had left in the previous forty years? The only explanation I can give is that she had been keeping them there. She had refused to go back to the Campbell enclave at Molinginish and had wanted to preserve the moat of the Minch between her family and the world. Her death released them and they returned to the other Campbells at Molinginish. There are buildings on the hillside there, pointed out to me by Simon Fraser, still known as the houses of Donald, John and Kate of the Islands. Donald died in Molinginish in 1910. John, the deaf and dumb giant, died there in 1937. Catriona had another illegitimate son Roderick and died in Tarbert in 1945. Young Kate worked for a gamekeeper on the Eishken estate at Mulhagery, just opposite on the Pairc shore. Every evening as she gazed out at the islands, which she had not left until she was fourteen, she is said to have wept at the loss of her home. Later on, as Mòr told my father in 1946, she went to keep house for ‘an old gentleman in Edinburgh’. Young Donald became a merchant seaman. Mary Campbell, old Donald’s niece, is said on Scalpay to have run away with a gamekeeper in Pairc. The memories of the Shiants slowly faded away and since Easter 1901, no one has lived there.

  Catherine’s body was taken by boat and then along the rough moorland road to the graveyard at Luskentyre on the Atlantic shore. It would be difficult to think of a more beautiful place in which to be buried. The bodies of the cleared reclaim some of the good land in death. The bay is the colour of the Bahamas and the rollers curl in off the Atlantic. The sand blown in by the winter storms is spread between the graves like a covering of snow and the fine machair grasses poke their tips above it. The stones of the most recent graves are big, black slabs, with the names of people from the villages of the east side, Rhenigadale, Scalpay, Urgha, Tarbert, Geocrab, Flodabay, carved on them, but the most poignant of all these memorials are the earliest, scattered around a low hummock to one side of the cemetery. They are poverty itself, a flake or two of pink-veined gneiss, picked from the surrounding moor, neither polished nor engraved, but marks of a kind, articulate for their inarticulateness. Nowadays a thicket of roses is encroaching on this oldest part of the Luskentyre burying ground. Somewhere within it, where the wrens jump from one thorny stem to another, landing from time to time on the little stones, the body of Catherine Campbell is concealed.

  16

  I WAS ALONE ON THE ISLANDS again in the very last of the autumn. It was the beginning of October and winter was in the offing. I was waiting for the geese to return from Greenland. Every day, I would go up to the cliffs of Garbh Eilean with the binoculars, lie down on the grass there by the Viking grave, and look out to the north, hoping to see the moment when they would come back in, the flock wheeling out of the northern sky, fresh from Iceland and the Faeroes. It was cold and wet. The days had shrunk and I could feel the year closing down around me. The summer birds had gone and all the people had left. There were no yachts on the winter Minch. All the business of the year, the comings and goings of the experts and scientists, historians and archaeologists, shepherds and fishermen, was done with and at last a kind of silence had descended. The islands were empty now, in a state of suspension, and a powerful absence hung over them.

  Back in the house, I sat over the fire and warmed my hands, while the dogs nuzzled their bodies next to me. A party of three shags flew low across the sea towards the beach and a family of eiders, all now grown, bobbed in the chop beside the black rocks. I looked out of the door at the cardboard-grey of the sky, felt the rain spitting at my face, went back in and switched on the radio. In a studio in Portland Place, a man I knew, an art historian, was speaking about EM Forster in Tuscany, the colour of apricots and the feeling of sun-warmed terracotta on the palms of his hands. Apricots would never have been eaten in the Shiants. Cherries would have been unknown. There was an orchard on Eilean Chaluim Chille in the mouth of Loch Erisort and apples might have come over from there. No plums, though, nor peaches or nectarines: only the unyielding substance of Shiant life.

  I turned to the fire and scraped the chair a little nearer across the lino. In Gaelic, you can only say you are ‘in the islands’ not ‘on the islands’ and ‘in’ is the right word. The Shiants on days like this surround and envelop you. You are embedded in them, not perched on top, not the tourist but the occupant, as secret here as a puffin in its burrow or a man in his bed. I could pull the islands around me like a coat against the wind.

  It was too late in the year for Freyja. I had taken her back to Scalpay a few weeks earlier. The weather on the evening before I left had been threatening, a cold southwesterly, driving the waves on to the beach. It had been a high spring tide and the sea had broken through the isthmus, as it does from time to time, so that the surf tailed out into the bay, where the gulls picked at it, looking for the little shrimps, I suppose, that had been washed out of the old weed on the shingle. I had my mobile phone with me – an innovation, as during 2000 a series of masts were erected in Lewis and Harris – and rang Rachel MacSween in Scalpay. ‘Is that Adam?’ she asked. ‘In a muddle as usual?’ It was. I asked her whether Donald, if he was around, could look out for me the next day. And perhaps take Freyja in tow if I was having difficulties on a lumpy sea? She said she would ask him. And she would see me that afternoon, ‘with your dirty washing as usual. And you dirtier than it.’

  As it was, the day was easy, and Freyja took a straight run in from the islands to the mouth of the Sound of Scalpay. When I was still a good way off, I saw a boat coming out towards me. It was Donald in the Jura. I had waited for the tide and it was now early in the afternoon. He been been fishing for prawns since four o’clock that morning and instead of going home to wash, eat and sleep, had come out to see that I was all right. ‘That’s you, Adam,’ he said on the radio.

  ‘Yes, Donald,’ I said, ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

  ‘Ach, no bother,’ he said, ‘no bother, no bother at all.’ With that, he swung the wheel and I saw the Jura ahead of me taking a wide sweep around on her own wake. We were soon alongside.

  ‘How’s it been?’ I shouted up at him. He was looking out through the window of his wheelhouse, a tired face, with his crewman Donald MacDermaid standing outside on the deck.

  ‘A desperate week,’ he said. ‘The prawns aren’t there. You’re all right though? Have you had a good time?’

  ‘A wonderful time,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s all that matters then. See you later.’ He leant on the throttle and the Jura surged towards the Sound and the North Harbour in Scalpay, leaving me in her wake, wondering if anywhere else in the world a man would come out for you like that.

  The twentieth century on the Shiants became increasingly a history of men at play. It was the holiday century where southerners with southern money came to entertain themselves in a romantic and deserted island. To begin with, a faint echo of productive use hung on. Lord Leverhulme, the Lancashire soap magnate, who bought the Shiants as part of Lewis in 1917, visited them three times. According to Neil Mackay, one of Leverhulme’s employees who accompanied him, the Lord of the Isles first arrived at this remote speck of
his island kingdom under a terrible misapprehension:

  His Harris factor had told him that the islands were overrun by rabbits. ‘Right,’ said Leverhulme. ‘I’ll breed silver foxes there. Foxes eat rabbits and rabbits eat grass, so it will cost me nothing.’ As they were approaching the island, I told him that he had been misinformed. There were no rabbits on the Shiants but large numbers of rats. Leverhulme was furious and on that occasion didn’t even land but turned back for a dance in Tarbert.

  All the same, despite these horrible inhabitants, there is a hint that Leverhulme might have loved the place too. After his death, very nearly the entire Leverhulme estate in the Western Isles was put up for sale, broken into lots. The auction was held on 22 October 1925 in Knight, Frank and Rutley’s Estate Room at 20 Hanover Square, London. The Shiants were Lot 13. It was the first time they had ever been sold separately from the other 355,000 acres of Lewis also up for sale that afternoon. ‘These interesting and rugged Islands,’ the catalogue began a little waftingly, ‘extending to an area of about 475 acres, upon which there are no buildings, but which are the haunt of numerous sea birds, are let as a farm to Mr Malcolm Macsween on a lease expiring Martinmas 1928, producing an annual rental of £60.’ If that didn’t sound very inviting, there was this specious worm dangled off the end: ‘The rights of netting salmon in the sea ex adverso of this Lot are included in the sale.’

  Both then and now, salmon are seen leaping in the bays of the Shiants about as often as a Blue Man invites himself aboard the Uig-to-Tarbert ferry. ‘These islands are the breeding ground of hundreds of seals,’ Malcolm MacSween later told Compton Mackenzie, ‘and you know how salmon and seals agree to share a coast. “The former are always devoured by the latter.”’

  Perhaps the Shiants were made to sound deliberately boring because Lord Leverhulme’s son had told the auctioneer, Sir Howard Frank, ‘to see that he obtained this Lot. He desired for sentimental reasons to reserve this small portion as a memento of his father’s interest and also because he was now Viscount Leverhulme of the Western Isles.’

  Sir Howard, thank God, was incompetent. He recognised a man among the throng in the auction room and for some reason assumed he was bidding on behalf of the Viscount. He wasn’t. He was a professional valuer, a fan of Compton Mackenzie, the novelist, and had instructions from him to bid up to five hundred pounds for the Shiants and no more, half of a book advance which had unexpectedly come Mackenzie’s way. Five hundred pounds was little for an island producing sixty pounds a year rent, never mind the other benefits. ‘The bids went in quick succession and I put in my top figure, and Sir Howard knocked it down to me.’ There was a row but the sale had been made and Compton Mackenzie was now the owner.

  Perhaps it is true of any island, but over the decades, from generation to generation, anyone who has known the Shiants has come to love them.

  Malcolm MacSween to Compton Mackenzie

  October 1925

  Sir,

  I write this note to introduce myself as I understand you are now my proprietor … I became tenant 4 years ago and I myself had a small offer on them, but was not extra keen on account of recent reasons I need not touch on at present. I have about 200 ewes on the three islands. But they are capable of grazing another 200; if I could afford to get them … I do not keep a shepherd. It is too lonely a spot for a shepherd. I couldn’t get anyone to go. There was a shepherd on some time and the stone wall of the house is still as good as the day when he left … Only that one of the gables fell off a bit … I will await your further consignment of queries which I will be always pleased to answer. I am quite sure of this that you will really enjoy a trip to these ancient islands and any time you come I will make it my business that you will get out to them as comfortably as possible.

  Compton Mackenzie eventually married two of MacSween’s daughters, Chrissie, the elder, and, after her death, Lily, whom he had first met in Tarbert in 1925 when she was eight years old. He was a fervent Scottish nationalist and, as his biographer Andro Linklater has said, the Shiants were for him ‘a talisman of Scotland’. As Compton Mackenzie wrote in an article soon after buying them,

  To most people, the Shiant Islands mean nothing. To some they mean the most acute bout of sea-sickness between Kyle and Stornoway as the MacBrayne steamer wallows in the fierce overfalls that guard them. To a very few they mean a wild corner of the world, the memory of which remains for ever in the minds of those who have visited their spellbound cliffs and caves …

  In the incomparable beauty of their sea, their rock and their grass – ‘the bottle-green water at the base of this cliff, the greenish-black glaze of these columns, that lustrous green of the braes and summits …’ – they were a link to his Mackenzie ancestors. He reroofed the house which the Campbells had left in 1901, putting corrugated tin over it, panelled the inside and used it for a day or two at a time to write. The Shiants is the setting for his two-volume novel, The North Wind of Love, published during the war, in which they are called the Shiel Islands. The hero, a Mackenzie-like playwright, John Ogilvie, builds a house (with a Tuscan loggia!) on Eilean Mhuire, called Castle Island in the book, from which he dreams of and plots for an independent Scotland.

  At one point, Ogilvie/Mackenzie, suffering from acute Shiant-love, takes his daughter Corinna to a favourite place at the far end of the island from the house:

  There was one cave in which a great emerald of sea-water blazed in what seemed the heart of it, and from the roof enamelled with rose and mauve a slim silver freshet spurted forth to meet the sea-water in a perfect curve. And then as the boat penetrated deeper the air in the cave lightened and the sides danced with reflected ripples until presently it was seen that the cave was an arch leading to a beach so nearly hidden by great basaltic columns on either side that they had passed it in the boat unperceived.

  ‘I don’t think there can be anything so lovely as this anywhere, do you?’ Corinna asked her father.

  In his ginger suede shoes, his green check suit, his pipe, his posed stance in front of the fireplace, with the writing room in his house in Barra wallpapered in gold and his dazzling ability to write a novel while listening to a record he was reviewing for the magazine Gramophone, Mackenzie bewitched the Hebrideans. The Shiants have never known a man like him. But it was this theatrical egotism, allied to the obsessive habit of moving from one island to another, from Capri to Herm and Jethou in the Channel Islands, on to the Shiants (via an unsuccessful attempt to buy Flora Macdonald’s house at Flodigarry on Skye) and then Barra, which lay behind an attack made on him in 1926 by DH Lawrence. The Nottinghamshire apostle of candour and intimacy would never have condoned the play-acting, self-aggrandisement and self-regarding island-love to which Compton Mackenzie was prone. ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ was a scarcely veiled attack on Mackenzie for which Mackenzie never forgave Lawrence. The story is the only moment a writer of world standing comes anywhere near the Shiants: ‘There was a man who loved islands. He was born on one but it didn’t suit him, as there were too many other people on it beside himself. He wanted an island all of his own: not necessarily to be alone on it, but to make it a world of his own.’

  The love of islands, the story maintains, is a neurotic condition. They are not so much islands as I-lands, where the inflated self smothers and obliterates all other forms of life. The story ends with the Mackenzie-like figure contemplating what had once been his beautiful private landscape now dead and sterile under drifts of egotistical snow. The place had died at the hands of an imposed personality.

  It is not a great story, too much the working out of a theoretical type, but it is a symbolic moment in the history of the Shiants and it marks a change in the history of attitudes towards islands. In the early eighteenth century, to Robinson Crusoe, for example, an island was in some ways a prison, a symbol of his suffering, divorced from the company of men, full of hostilities which his own energy and enterprise must struggle to overcome. An island was a reduced form of what the world could offer.


  By the middle of the eighteenth century, that view had begun to change, largely at the hands of one man. The grandfather of the modern love of islands, of all those visitors to the Hebrides, of Robert Louis Stevenson and Gauguin, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was Rousseau who invented the idea that islands were not somehow less than what the world could give you, but the most perfect of places in which the solitary self could flower.

  In the autumn of 1765, Rousseau went to live on the tiny Ile St Pierre, set in the Lac de Bienne in northern Switzerland. He had recently been stoned by religious conservatives in the Swiss village of Môtiers, and on the tiny island, where there was a farmhouse, his paranoias and fears were calmed. He felt secure within those visible shores. He botanised with patience and care and had a plan to write a book about this most precious and protected place. People might mock, he thought, but love of place could only attend to minute particulars. ‘They say a German once composed a book about a lemon-skin,’ he later wrote. ‘I could have written one about every grass in the meadows, every moss in the woods, every lichen covering the rocks.’ The Ile St Pierre was the Eden away from society that he sought:

  I was able to spend scarcely two months on that island, but I would have spent two years, two centuries and the whole of eternity without becoming bored with it for a moment. Those two months were the happiest of my life, so happy that they would be enough for me, even if they had lasted the whole of my life.

  That was probably Compton Mackenzie’s view of the Shiants too. But Lawrence’s point is the modern and post-Freudian one: the healthy state is social; isolation is aberrant; and islands represent a withdrawal from the mainstream where in some ways it is our duty to remain. This is a return to the early-eighteenth-century view that uninhabited islands, and other stretches of empty country, are places which would be better off occupied, used and made social. In Scotland, because of the continuing resonance of the Clearances, this remains a powerfully held position: the cleared is the wronged; empty land is an insult to society; privacy is an indulgence of the powerful; there is no distinction between ‘land’ – the acres – and ‘Land’ – the nation; and in that coalescence the land clearly should belong to all. It is inconceivable nowadays that a Scottish Nationalist would proclaim his private ownership of the Shiants in the way Mackenzie did. He would have transferred it to the community many years ago.