Island of Dreams

by Dan Boothby

  But I knew I’d failed with Travels, knew that it wasn’t good enough. And that, more importantly, I wasn’t good enough. Before coming to the island I had churned out seven guidebooks in four years and I never wanted to research another. Writing guidebooks isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. What I wanted to write wasn’t going anywhere, and writing was tough. I was constantly assailed by self-doubt, self-loathing, and a realization of the triviality of my ‘calling’. No one – not even family and friends – thought it was a sensible occupation, or any kind of occupation at all. ‘Still scribbling?’ they’d ask. ‘Had a best-seller yet? Sold the film rights? Aha-ha-ha.’ I was fed up with those ‘poor, mad fool’ looks of sympathy I got whenever I was stupid enough to let slip I was ‘working on a book’. And even when my guidebooks had been published the money I earned from all that work had been rubbish. I put the typescript of Travels and my hopes away, and in my mind I crossed out in thick black marker the idea of ‘Author’ as a career option. I’d have to think up another way to earn a living.

  I hadn’t seen any robins for weeks when one flew into the bothy, fluttered around in circles, crashed into a window and dropped in a heap on my desk. It picked itself up, took off, missed the open doorway and bonked into the window again. This happened three times. I raised my arm gently, pointed to the door and quietly told the robin to stop being brainless and make for that. The robin flew into the window again, then flew to the space heater, dropped to the flagstone floor and chirped a pathetic chirrup. I bent down to it and it stepped onto my outstretched finger. I took it outside. It sat on my finger for a moment, chirruped loudly at me, exerted a feather-light pressure on my hand, and flew away.

  By mid-February the trees on the island were in bud and the paths, after rain, crawled with slugs, some of which ate each other. By the end of the month daffodils, the descendants of those planted as bulbs decades ago by the lighthouse keepers, were pushing through the same spot where Richard Frere had mentioned them growing in the spring of 1965: ‘a mass of unexpected daffodils brightened the slope below the cottage.’

  Robins flew at each other, bickered endlessly and chased the chaffinches. One morning I watched a pine marten sneaking along. I stood stock-still behind the half-windowed door of my room. We were only seven feet apart, the pine marten and I, and it knew something wasn’t quite right. It froze, stretched its tail out behind it, stalked round the corner and was gone. It was the only one I ever saw on the island.

  I watched a shrew attempting to get at peanuts in a feeder I’d hung from a short length of broom handle stuck in the front lawn. The shrew inched up the broom handle like a caterpillar, lost its grip and toppled into the grass. It did this again and again. I felt like Robert the Bruce watching his spider, and the message was almost the same – ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again’, but my shrew was a complete failure and I began to feel sorry for it. I fetched bread, squatted low and shuffled along the lawn, throwing chunks of bread towards the hungry shrew as I went. The shrew twitched its pointy, whiskered nose but didn’t eat. I held out a piece. The shrew sniffed, elongated its little body and sank long nicotine-coloured rodent teeth into the fleshy pad of my middle finger. I squealed. I shook my hand. The shrew, its body flying from side to side, hung on grimly. I shook my hand more fiercely and the shrew spun off it into long grass. Bright blood dripped from my finger. The shrew emerged from the long grass, looked about myopically, sniffed, and catching my scent sniffed some more and advanced. I retreated, reminded of the story of a fur trapper found dead in his Alaskan log cabin long ago. The trapper’s skeleton, collapsed in an armchair, had been picked clean and the man who found it had opened the cabin door to be faced with a sniffing, murderous, moving carpet of shrews.

  Towards the end of February, while I was driving to the start of a cliff-top ramble on Skye with a full load of trustees squashed into my car, something under the bonnet went clunk! I pumped the accelerator but got no response. I steered for the side of the road and we rolled silently to a halt beside a loch. Below us a gull was flapping its wings in a fury, struggling with something or other as usual; a lone dabchick paddled unconcernedly by. I opened the bonnet of my car. The trustees and I peered in and jiggled a lead or two and I tried the ignition. Nothing. The heaviest of my passengers (and somewhere not so very deep inside myself I was already blaming his weight for overtaxing my car) telephoned to Kyle for a taxi. I telephoned a garage. The damage turned out to be serious, and costly. The lemon had run out of juice. I scrapped it. From now on I could walk to the shops, or take the dinghy.

  My world shrank considerably, my life confined to the few square miles of sea and rock surrounding me. But I didn’t mind. The creatures on the island kept me company. And the people in the cities and clogged urban spaces were doing what they always did whenever I looked. And there was always Ewan the stalker’s train at the station in Kyle waiting to take me back to them if I needed.

  Hi-Arts, the Highland arts organization I’d asked to look at my work-in-progress, sent me an email. The assessor had been impressed and the organization was offering me a complimentary place on a week-long residential writers’ ‘masterclass’ at a retreat on the north-east coast of Scotland at the end of April. A literary agent would be attending and wanted to meet me.

  L-shaped. We have to keep going, keep pressing on.

  We’d been sitting over a few too many pints by the fire in the pub in Isleornsay. It was a filthy day outside but the atmosphere in the pub was as convivial and lubricated as you can get.

  Sandy placed his pint glass soundlessly on the table.

  ‘Since the end of the seventies, coinciding with Thatcher’s Conservative government and its policies, Britain has changed almost beyond recognition. Not for the better, neither. We’re all richer, sure, but poverty’s relative. Even the poorest estate-dwelling, dole-drawing no-hoper’s got more than he knows what to do with. He’ll have his widescreen satellite TV, stereo system and mobile phone. He’ll run a car. He’s got more than me! He’s not poor. Let him go to Afghanistan or Africa if he wants to understand just how not-poor he is. All these scroungers, whining on about how “unfair” it all is, how badly off they are, they haven’t an effing clue.’

  I stared into the fire. When Sandy was on a roll there was nothing you could do to stop him.

  ‘And we’re not allowed to be amateurs any more. We’ve all got to be “professionals” now. “Experts”. Those poor people, told to work hard and get that promotion, climb the career ladder and get on, “You’ll be well rewarded!” And there’re all these non-jobs they’ve got nowadays: management consultancy. I ask you! Did you know a window cleaner’s not called a window cleaner any more, oh no!, he’s a “vision-clearance executive”. I stacked shelves in Co-op once. D’you know what it said on my pay-slip? “Job Title: Ambient Replenishment Operative”. A paper shuffler is now an “officer”; middle-managers are “executive officers” and managers “chief executive officers”. What a joke! I tell you, next time you get to a city just you sit down at a train station during morning rush hour and watch all those poor ants scurrying to work, yawning, pasty-faced, tired, worried. And they’re all off to do what? What is the point of those jobs they’re all rushing off to do? Those poor, poor people. Office fodder, that’s what they are. Living in a world of blah, living on credit, and working their guts out to keep paying off the debt they’ve sunk into just so’s they can keep up with the Joneses.

  ‘I get in one of those fascist modern cars and it won’t let me drive anywhere until I’ve put my seatbelt on, and the engine’s so complicated it needs a computer to tell a mechanic what’s wrong! And CCTV everywhere and rules about this and that and being cautioned all the time to “take care” and “watch out” and nannied in train stations and airports by anonymous patronizing suety-voiced announcers; over-regulated, over-governed . . . It’s like 1985!’

  ‘You mean 1984,’ I said. ‘It’s a good book that. Orwell was an interesting man. One of
the things he said was: “At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.” There’s another goo—’

  ‘And we watch the news on TV, hear the reports on the radio, read the misery in the newspapers and all the time we’re bombarded with versions of the same message, “It’s a terrible, big bad world out there so stay in your home! Keep your children indoors! Murder, rape and terrorism! It’s everywhere! You’re surrounded! Out-of-control drug-crazed teenagers and another pensioner got her head bashed in yesterday for the measly eight pounds twenty pence she had in her purse.” Aagh!’

  Sandy drew breath, took a sip of his pint. I took my eyes from the fire and looked around. At a nearby table a pretty young woman in a red velvet dress was whispering loudly to a friend, ‘. . . and there he was, washing his balls in the sink!’

  ‘Twenty-first century England and most of “Great” – ha! – Britain,’ Sandy went on, ‘is isolating and boring. The villages are empty – they’re dead! Oldsters indoors watching daytime TV and the young away working in air-conditioned offices in town. And in the evenings they’re still dead, the villages, everyone stuck inside watching moronic TV shows that are turning them into dummies. So unnatural we’ve become. The farms have been sold off to “heritage” quangos and the farmers who still farm are paid not to grow anything. A lot of the countryside is dead too. Look at the Lake District – pretty, but dead. Land isn’t worked any more, it’s “husbanded”. And every year more of it gets carved up and sold off for yet another road-building scheme.

  ‘I hate the way Britain has changed. The sugar-and-fat-and-salt-laden fast food that we’re offered and the growing obesity of everyone and the aggressive driving and all this shopping – this consuming – everyone has to do. Messed-up schooling producing dense chav kids with no common-sense, who turn into whining adults who possess even less sense of social responsibility than they did when they were kids. Teenage girls who get pregnant so they can get a council house and benefits and feed fast food to their kids because they don’t know how or can’t be bothered to cook, and so then their kids never learn how to, or care. And on it goes.

  ‘And the high streets dying and all looking the same with the supermarkets and chain stores vacuuming up everyone’s money while the independent shops unable to compete close down. And all this choice we’re offered of things to buy, but almost all of it pap. Britain’s not great anymore, Dan, it’s bankrupt. What do we produce now? Tell me. What? Everything is imported. It makes me sad. It really does.’

  Sandy broke off to waggle his empty glass at me.

  I got a round in.

  ‘Thanks. But all that, all that . . . garbage, is a long way from up here, thank God. The local teenagers hang out by the bus stop in Kyle, but there’s never the sense of threat like you’d feel down south. This place works. We more or less police ourselves. People leave you alone, give you your space, but will help if you ask them to. Most of the work people do up here has a point to it at least. And yes, I know there’s gossip – there always is in small communities – but you have the space to get away from it, from everyone. And there’s that sense of adventure and danger out at sea or on the hill – that sense of mortality . . . it humbles us all.’

  We drank on until our money ran out. There wasn’t an ATM within twenty miles. We walked out into a gale to hitch a lift back to Kyleakin.

  ‘God, the weather up here gets me down sometimes,’ Sandy called, over the blow. ‘I start cracking on with converting Ebb ’n Flow and then it blows a hooley and I have to down tools again. Sometimes I wonder if she’ll ever be finished.’

  We walked on down the road. No cars were passing. We weaved our way on through the black night.

  Johnny Ach telephoned. He’d been to see Jimmy Watt. They’d hatched a plan to revive the fortunes of Kyleakin and the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust. Jimmy Watt knew of a decommissioned lightship up for sale somewhere in England. The lightship would be acquired, brought north and moored in Kyleakin Marina. Money would be raised and the lightship restored. A new national museum concentrating on lightships, lighthouses and lighthouse keepers would be established right here in tiny Kyleakin. The entrance money would be shared between the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust and other deserving causes in Kyleakin and Kyle. It was practically a done deal, Johnny Ach told me. He had all the right contacts.

  Then he went and died.

  Five

  QUICKSANDS, SCOTTISH HISTORY AND A THRUPENNY BIT

  I got a lift to the Catholic church with one of the trustees. We walked down from the car park to merge with a sea of mourners standing in the sharp frosty air outside the church. I stood behind a naval officer, smart in his black serge uniform, and spotted many of the trustees in the crowd, and Susan Browning, and Pete, and Ewan, John the chairman and Marcus, the Kyle lifeboat crew in their kit, Sandy . . . There were other faces I’d seen in the villages, and many I hadn’t. A white-haired man I thought might be Jimmy Watt stood a few feet away. The silent shuffling congregation stretched from the doors of the church to the shores of Loch Long. A loudspeaker had been set up on a bench so we could all hear the stentorian tones of the priest expounding his views on death and the afterlife. Celebration of a full and useful life was sidelined in favour of a hectoring lecture on the more important matter of earning one’s place beside God in heaven. After a long time the priest stopped squawking and a hymn was sung and prayers said. I turned my gaze to the godless crows and jackdaws flying free above the churchyard. Up on the surrounding hills the backsliding sheep – so far away they looked like puffballs – grazed unconcernedly. The freezing fog of four hundred exhalations coalesced above us. The priest’s haverings warmed the air again before silence, the shuffling of boots on gravel, a cough, a sob.

  Johnny Ach’s coffin was wheeled from the church on a trolley. The builder from Kyle, his face as dangerously florid as Johnny’s had been in life, stood beside the churchyard gate and called out how it was going to be. In the Highlands, by tradition, the builder is also the undertaker. Johnny had been a big man, in many ways, and a heavy one. There would be a changeover of bearers to carry the coffin to the hearse, which would transport the departed to the Clan Macrae cemetery at the head of the loch. The cortège began, Johnny’s family followed, a flood streamed slowly behind them, a slipstream of grievers, rememberers, well-wishers.

  We stood by drooping snowdrops on a hillside above Clachanduich cemetery; a piper on a hillock played a lament. Men wearing the team colours of Johnny’s shinty club lined the path to the grave. The immortal mountains surrounded us. We stood to the keening of pipes, the swishing of the wind through the heather, the gargle of a brook on its way to the sea. It wasn’t alcohol in the end. It was his heart that, aged fifty, did for Johnny. I don’t even know if Johnny drank.

  Before I went to live in the Highlands I had always viewed small communities with a great deal of suspicion. I’d seen them as quicksand – pretty deadly – and whenever I’d found myself near one I trod very carefully so as to remain free from its strictures. I was always watching my step, and had always done so. It was what my ‘non-book’ Travels had been about – the avoidance of getting ‘bogged down’. But over that spring on the island something strange, and happy, began to happen to me. Villagers, strangers I’d seen in the shops and had passed along the roads of Kyle or Kyleakin, raised an arm in salutation and smiled or nodded and said hello when our paths crossed. With time I gained confidence and would stop to chat and take in the day with them. When one evening I walked into the bar of the Lochalsh Hotel and the barmaid smiled and said, ‘Will it be the usual?’ I felt I’d been accepted at last, sort of. Finding your way in a small community isn’t about getting sucked down to death by a treacherous patch of quicksand, it’s about finding soil fertile enough in which to take root. I hadn’t understood this before. It takes time to find where you fit, but we all find our place in the end.

  I have come to the conclusion that there are five levels to a Highland community:

  1. NATI
VES

  Natives ‘belong’ in the Highlands. Their ties to the land go back generations. They went to school in the Highlands and have a wide circle of friends, family and business connections locally. They tend to live in modern housing and council houses, work for the Highland Council (the only provider of for-life jobs up here) or the utility companies (telephone, electricity, water, etc.). Natives may have left the Highlands at some point in their lives – for work, for love, to travel – and have returned to settle, raise a family and grow old amongst friends and relatives.

  Natives tend to socialize within their own stratum and don’t have much time for anyone below the level of Local (see below) because these others are often transient and any links forged will be broken soon enough. What’s the point of making a friend of someone who’ll shortly be away out the door? Many Natives have ancestral links to pioneering East Coast fishing folk, Lowland Scots and Glaswegians who moved to the Highlands during the boom times of many years ago and stayed on.

  With such strong ties to the area, Natives may own crofting land which, once it has been ‘de-crofted’, can be sold for £70,000 and more per third of an acre plot. For many a Native, brought up in a land where life is hard and money scarce, a bird in the hand is well worth selling to the nearest cat and it doesn’t matter much where that cat or its money comes from. Unfortunately, selling off parcels of crofting land as building plots to Incomers (see below) has led to many a dispute over land use and rights of access.