by Amy Liptrot
The North Isles are spread out below and, as the sky lightens, we pass above illuminated fish farms, aquamarine bays and dark skerries before reaching Papay. The island is small, low and green, mostly split into orderly fields by dykes and fences. The sea churns white at its rocky edges, as if the island is constantly fighting off engulfment.
We land briefly on Westray before making a two-minute hop over to Papay – the shortest scheduled flight in the world. Papay’s airport at first seems little more than a field and a shed. Flights are met by farmers Bobby and his brother David, who, I learn, two or three times a day break from their work, put on waterproof uniforms and drive 4x4s to the airport to attend to the plane. Jan, who lives on the island and whom I met when I was here in the summer, is waiting to meet me. I’m carrying, among other things, a bag of fire kindling, my laptop, three kilos of porridge and thermal underwear. She drives me just a couple of minutes along the road that bisects the island to the little pink house where I’ll be living for the next four months.
The RSPB has a reserve on Papay and the house is the RSPB warden’s cottage, named Rose Cottage for its lurid pink paint job, making it distinct from the stone and pebble-dashed houses on the island. Locally, the cottage is called ‘the birdy hoose’, home during summer to the ‘birdy wife’ or ‘birdy man’ but it is usually empty over the winter. I’m no longer working for the RSPB but when I realised they had a house empty for the winter and asked about it, they kindly agree to let me stay there, paying a small rent and keeping the place dry. This winter there will be a light on in Rose Cottage.
I had been warned that the house, which I’ve not visited before, is draughty and cold, and when I arrive, I am apprehensive. It has been empty for a few weeks and smells slightly damp, but once I get the open fire going and hang a heavy curtain over the low door to block draughts, it’s really quite cosy in the kitchen. I sit in the old armchair by the fire, looking around at the mismatched paintwork and crockery. The house has no insulation so, like the caravan, it will be impossible to live here without being aware of the weather.
The cottage, built in the sixties to house workers building a ‘new’ (as it’s still known) pier for the ferry to moor, is at the narrowest part of the island, just five hundred metres from each side to the sea. Through the two windows in the kitchen facing south and east, I can see the water surrounding the island on three sides, port, fore and starboard, and watch the sun’s short southern journey as I did last winter while building dykes. Here, I will have a constant awareness that I am on an island and have been told that, in high weather, sea spray can be blown the whole way across our small strip of land.
There are objects in the house collected by the wardens who have spent summers here: shells, bones, small pieces of crockery worn down into rounded pebbles by the sea. A vertebra of a small whale hangs on the bathroom door and a perfect spherical sea urchin sits on the mantelpiece. I find dissected owl pellets containing the bones of Orkney voles, and a storm petrel wing, still carrying the distinctive and not unpleasant musky odour of the bird.
Although I’m new to Papay, I’m not new to rural island life. Rose Cottage is at the end of a farm track and the sound of a tractor passing my bedroom window is familiar. I grew up with the cycles of the farm seasons and know the daily winter feeding routine, when the hay or silage harvested in the summer is doled out to hungry livestock, and note the day the cattle are taken into the byres for the winter. Outside, I wear wellies all winter, like Dad does most of the year.
I decide that I will spend my time in the kitchen with the fire, leaving the rest of the house to the cold. From the kitchen, I see the Holm, Papay’s calf island, and the creel boat belonging to Douglas, now the island’s only fisherman. I can see all of the biggest North Isles apart from Stronsay. To the east is a landmass with cliffs forming three steps: ‘the heads of Eday’. Further along the horizon lies Sanday, and when the sun rises, it lights the island’s curves from behind, making silhouettes of wind turbines on the hilltops. North again, on a clear day North Ronaldsay is visible, so low-lying that just the houses can be seen, disembodied and floating on the sea.
On the other side of Papay, to the west, is our nearest neighbour Westray, home to three hundred people, supporting such things as a shellfish factory, a junior-secondary school and a chippie. The peedie ferry goes from Papay to Westray and back every day, carrying one teenage schoolboy and goods from the bakery. Behind Westray, the heather-clad mound of Rousay rises, and beyond that, the hills on Orkney’s Mainland. I watch clouds decaying into rain or snow on the Mainland on days when it is dry on Papay.
On Papay itself, down the road along the middle of the island, beyond the airfield, is the cluster, not quite big enough to be called a village, of the post office, church, school and shop/hostel, seeming closer than it feels when I am trying to cycle there on a windy day.
At the moment there is still some green in the fields, but as the winter progresses the landscape will become more washed out and by March the view from my kitchen will be at times almost monochrome, if it wasn’t for the fluorescent orange windsock at the airport. I didn’t imagine I’d move to Papay and find myself in a flight path. On these winter mornings, I’m often woken by the plane descending over Rose Cottage. Sometimes it spooks every bird on the island, it seems, and I watch from my kitchen window ten or so different flocks rising at once, the sky suddenly busy with clouds of greylag geese, turnstones, golden plovers, snipe.
Having my own place again is a risk. This would be the perfect location to do some solitary drinking. I remember those nights at the kitchen table on the farm when I was working on Flotta and later in London bedrooms. Each session would take the same pattern: at two to five drinks I would be elated, feeling free and adult; but after six to ten a desperate loneliness came and I would make frantic efforts to avoid being alone. Often, in the mornings, I’d go through my phone history, text messages and emails to find out whom I’d tried to contact, looking for an audience or affection.
I went through years of hung-over days when my only aim would be to avoid talking to anyone or having to do much work. I had a couple of hours, every day or two, of heady drunkenness and spent the rest of the time either repairing the damage done or hanging on – white-knuckling – until I could get to the shop, be alone, and start the cycle again. I am not going to fall into that unhappy unproductive pattern again. Mum said that, during these coming months on Papay, I would need to call on strengths I hadn’t used before. She first moved to Orkney at the beginning of a long winter, so she knows.
Rose Cottage is like a perfectly designed halfway house, where I can have my own place and develop healthy, responsible routines, within the sheltered community of the island.
There are no flatmates or close neighbours to hear me crying at night. I worry about being the type of clueless incomer with few practical skills, who gets things wrong and can’t cope in the first harsh winter. In rough weather the little concrete-block house makes noises: rain on the windows, wind shuddering down the chimney and creeping in under the door. Southerly winds are when it’s coldest in the house, when draughts sneak through imperceptible cracks in the window frames.
It’s been some time since anyone’s touched me. This week I’ve seen more seals than people, noses uppermost in the bay. There is the opportunity of isolation here in our little houses down tracks, of security in the routines of island life. I used to have headaches and miss school several days a month. In drink, I found new escapes and solaces; I had hangovers and called in ‘sick’ to work. I was lazy and flaky but also maybe I needed those spaces to retreat to. Since I’ve been sober I have treated myself like a fragile object, giving myself plenty of space and simplicity, weeks spent keeping close and low.
There are things found on Mainland Orkney that we don’t have on Papay: a swimming pool, a pub, a resident minister, a doctor. There are also no hares or hedgehogs here. But the mammals we do have, we have in abundance: seals, rabbits, mice. Scientists
are interested in studying small island populations. The house mouse – Mus domesticus – on Papay was found in a study to have a difference in mandible morphology: bigger jaws than mice elsewhere. Limited to a small breeding pool, the mice evolved to suit their habitat.
I tell people I came here simply for the cheapest rent I could find. Although that isn’t completely true, I didn’t choose to come here to ‘downsize’ or ‘get back to nature’. It wasn’t my plan to return home for recovery, it was more that I came back for a visit and got stuck. This is where I come from, not – like most English people in Orkney – where I chose to come to. The last year has been a gradual process of saying, ‘I’ll just stay for a few more weeks,’ for dyking or lambing, then for a few months the corncrakes, and now I’ve committed to a whole winter on Papay. Orkney keeps holding onto me.
I get outside every day and have set tasks to sustain myself over the winter. I’ve heard that, to the far north-west, you can see Fair Isle on a clear day and I scan the horizon with binoculars. I search the beach for groatie buckies, the local name for small pink cowrie shells, prized as the most special kind of shell to find. I bake bread. I photograph patterns. I pick up driftwood for the fire – best done after a full moon or a gale, the most fruitful coast depending on which way the wind has been blowing.
While I was the corncrake wife, I was busy and professional and rarely mentioned what had happened to me in the previous few years. Here, I have time and space so am able to let myself think about how and why I made the decisions I did, and in particular what made me realise that opting for rehab and total sobriety was not an overreaction to my situation.
Less than a month after I was arrested for drink-driving in Orkney, I was back in London. Although I know the attack was not my fault, it would not have happened if I had not been so drunk.
Starting in the afternoon, I met Gloria, as I often did, at the pub on the market. The stalls were packing up, revealing a debris of discarded vegetables and cardboard coffee cups. It was still afternoon but people were drunk, sitting on the kerb with pint glasses or cans from the corner shops. Gloria had recently moved to Hackney from Notting Hill after refusing to take any more money from her father. That summer she still had savings and I was pretending I was okay, acting like I still had a job.
I liked to roll the chilled glass against my face while listening to Gloria’s lightly sarcastic comments about mutual friends. We talked brightly, picking out the positives in our unlikely job prospects and joking about the men we’d hurt. In the female bluster of mutual reassurance I forgot to say what I felt: that I was scared and that something was about to give.
From the market, my drinking moved on to a Vietnamese restaurant, then back to my brother’s house, where I was sleeping on the sofa, to get dressed up, then the club. Someone gave me some MDMA. I tried to go home but on the bus some people – I’d never met them before – told me about a warehouse party and I joined them. It was wild, staircases full of bodies, some of whom I knew. I’d never been to the place before and it was so good. I suddenly realised that it was close to my ex-boyfriend’s house and I wanted to tell him about it. I’d gone over the peak: my excited drunkenness had tipped over into recklessness and self-pity.
I stumbled to his house – he’d tried to hide his new address from me but I’d found it out – and was ringing the bell, bashing on the door, calling his phone. No answer. I was distraught. I had to get his attention. I walked on, down a side street in the vague direction of where I was staying. He asked later why I had started dressing so slutty. A car stopped beside me and, although I can’t remember exactly what he said, the driver asked me to get in and I did.
It seemed as if we were driving for a long time but I was eventually picked up by the ambulance not very far from where I’d got into the car. I remember having some kind of mundane conversation about the best route and I think I asked to be taken home. I was on my phone, calling my ex, and left a message on his answerphone telling him I was in a stranger’s car.
Then the driver of the car punched me in the face as hard as he could. Everything changed. I was more sober and knew I had to escape. I opened the car door but we were still moving. I later told the police that this was when I lost my shoe. He stopped, picked up a large heavy boot from the footwell and hit me over the back of the head. I knew with no doubt that he wanted to knock me out, if not kill me. There was a struggle and we were both on the ground outside the passenger door, beside the park. He began dragging me, by my ankles, into the park, towards some trees.
The only thing I remember him saying to me is ‘Be quiet.’ I was not quiet. I was terrified, drunk, on drugs, and had been hit hard on the head twice, but somehow I quickly sized up the situation. He was not a big man and didn’t have a weapon. Although I’d never experienced violence like that before, childhood play fights with my brother came back to me and I knew I had a chance of overpowering him. I screamed for help and shouted, ‘I am stronger than you, I am stronger than you,’ kicking and struggling as he tore at my tights.
I saw three men coming towards me. Moments later, it seemed, we were surrounded by flashing lights and people and my attacker had gone. I had held tightly onto my mobile phone the whole time.
At the police station they took my statement and my clothes, and in the hospital they X-rayed my head. I weighed myself and was lighter than I had been since I was a teenager. My ex was there. He’d finally returned my call and run to the park. I had his attention. We went for a cigarette outside the hospital. There was a late-night pub across the road and I suggested we go over for a drink. He looked at me with disbelief and horror and told me he couldn’t stay with me.
The attacker had run from the scene, leaving his car. I don’t remember giving my statement to the police but apparently my description of an ‘early thirties, thin white male’ resulted in a swift search of the area and one wrong man being locked up for the night. My attacker was found at his own address the next day.
In the following days a police photographer came and took photos of my black eye and the bruises in the shape of fingers around my upper arms and ankles. Although the bump on my cheekbone from the punch eventually went away, I still have a scar on the back of my head from the boot. My hair grows unusually around it and sometimes I reach and touch it.
In court a few months later, I asked for a screen so I would not have to see him again. He was identified as the person responsible for a very similar attack on another young woman a few months before. While I had remained conscious after he hit me, apparently the other girl had not been so ‘lucky’ and was found later walking, confused, by a motorway. He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment for two counts of attempted rape.
The sea is churned up around the Holm today. I ride my bike to the shop in a cross-wind, blowing hail into me horizontally and tilting my bike. The chain snaps and I push the bike home, where an email from London upsets me, but then a different colour washes over my computer screen and I look back through the window and the sky is changing: there’s a patch of blue sky above Eday and the clouds are fringed with palest pink. A flame breaks through in the fire, my heart slows to a contented rate and everything momentarily is quivering and calm.
I’ve been on Papay for four weeks now and it’s like one of those months when I didn’t leave central London. London is an island within the rest of the UK, defined and separate. In these weeks on the island, living alone, where the markers of my routine are so different and I’m enjoying the simple challenges of keeping myself warm and fed, I am learning how to behave decently in everyday life after years of confusion. My possessions are scattered. My ties and traditions are my own to make. I can choose where I will belong.
I’ve worn no make-up and removed no body hair. On rare days I have a visitor – Mum comes from the Mainland, Jan gives me a lift to the shop: I wonder if I should brush my hair and take the animal bones off the table. I have the odd pang for takeaways and cafés, and sometimes I can physically feel the n
ightlife, happening out there without me while I sit by the fire with a blanket over my knees, wondering how I suddenly became an old lady. I miss seeing and being seen and feeling close to the centre of the action. The news here is different – the weather rather than politics.
* * *
My centre of gravity has moved north. I’ve been thinking more about Shetland, Iceland and Faroe. I am still sometimes shocked by everything that happened, that I was in such dangerous situations, that I ended up in rehab, that I haven’t drunk alcohol for twenty months, two weeks and four days and that this is how it feels. I’m back here, on these windy rocks, looking for hope in my imagination and my surroundings.
Every day on Papay, there’s a moment, looking back, facing into the northerly wind, at the coastline I’ve just walked, for instance, when my heart soars. I see starlings flocking, hundreds of individual birds forming and re-forming shapes in liquid geometry, outwitting predators and following each other to find a place to roost for the night. The wind blows me from behind so strongly that I’m running and laughing. Calm yet alert, after a few weeks on Papay I notice that I am always pretty much aware of the height of the tide, the direction of the wind, the time of sunrise and sunset, and the phase of the moon.
I start noticing that low tides – when the rocks reaching over to the Holm are most exposed – come later twice a day, as the moon appears earlier, and I think about how they are connected. The tide is influenced not just by the earth’s rotation and the positions of the moon and the sun, but also the moon’s altitude above the equator and the topography of the seabed – or bathymetry – and the complicated way water moves between islands. I think about the earth’s rotation, and realise that it’s not the tide that is going out or the moon rising: rather, I am moving away from them.
Nearby, on the uninhabited skerry of Rusk Holm, a stone tower with a spiralling walkway was built so that, at the highest tides, the hardy ‘holmie’ sheep that live there eating seaweed could climb to escape being swept away by the highest waves and drowning. Right now this little house and island is my Rusk Holm tower, somewhere I can breathe as the churning waters rise below.