by Dan Boothby
We stood silently for a time. There was so much I wanted to ask him, the last otter boy. He had the bluest of blue eyes.
‘We used to cut turf from the hill behind the house up there,’ he eventually said, and pointed: ‘For the fires. We flew a flag from a pole by the water tank.’
‘Have you been back to the island before?’ I asked.
‘Once or twice. Virginia McKenna contacted me once, to see if I had anything I could donate for the Long Room.’
I left the woodpile and we walked along the path towards the house. I wanted to show him what we’d been doing.
‘You’ve good paths now,’ he said. ‘When I lived here most of the island was just rough. We had a ram and a couple of goats. They’d eat anything. And we burnt off the heather in the summer, to keep it manageable.’ He stopped. ‘This . . . this must be where the generator shed was, somewhere here.’
‘It was demolished during the renovations,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘One of my jobs was to shut down the generator last thing at night. I always took Gavin’s deerhounds with me to give them a run. But really . . . it was because I was scared.’
I could see memories clouding his eyes. ‘There weren’t any streetlights in Kyleakin back then and once I shut down the generator there’d be dead silence and pitch black. When there was a moon it wasn’t too bad but I was only young.’
We walked on and stopped beside Teko’s memorial, looking down the loch.
Tell me all about Gavin, I thought, and Jimmy and Richard Frere.
‘A cup of tea?’ I said. ‘Coffee? Something stronger?’
Donald shook his head. ‘I should be going soon. It’s a long drive north. I was over on Skye and thought I’d look in, but . . .’ He seemed to shrink into himself a little.
‘There was an advertisement. In the Press and Journal. I had relatives on Skye. They saw the ad and told me about it and I wrote but heard nothing for a month or so. Then Richard Frere telephoned and invited me to go and stay at his house in Drumnadrochit for a few days. So he could check me out, I suppose, see if I’d make a suitable companion for Gavin here on the island.
‘Gavin was already ill by then and wasn’t around much. It was mostly me and John Lister-Kaye, working on the aviaries and fencing and looking after the animals they’d collected for the zoo. Once, when Gavin was here, he sent me to fetch the doctor and I got mixed up and went over in the dinghy to Kyleakin instead of Kyle. I telephoned him from the phone box in Kyleakin to say I couldn’t find a surgery anywhere in the village and he blew up at me. He had a quick temper. But he was in quite a lot of pain all the time those last months.’
Afternoon light was fading into dusk. Please talk on, I thought.
‘Is there anything you’d like to ask me before I go?’
Everything would have been the true answer. Tell me about the old days.
‘Do you pronounce it ‘Teeko’ or ‘Téko’,’ I said.
‘It rhymes with echo.’
Donald gazed down the loch. ‘Gavin wrote me a letter from his hospital bed in Inverness a few days before he died. I gave a copy of it to Virginia.’
‘We have it,’ I said. ‘It’s in the Long Room.’
The letter, sent to Donald at the end of August 1969, consists of a long humorous poem about rabbits and their reproductive habits. Douglas Botting included that part of the letter in his biography. Maxwell’s postscript, however, wasn’t included:
P.S. Having got that important collection of observations off my chest, I’ll tell you what else is off my chest. Three litres of fluid were drained off my right lung last night. That is the effect of straight pleurisy, which is possibly unconnected with the serious trouble, and has been responsible for my feeling so unutterably lousy. Too lousy to tell you how much your work has been appreciated; and the pleasant atmosphere you bring with you. I think we have the makings of a happy family at Kyleakin, though since your arrival I haven’t been able to contribute much to it myself.
Yrs, GM
P.P.S. I hope you’ll spend a bit of time with the crow, as Davy did.
‘I took the crow with me when I left,’ Donald said as he opened the door of his car. ‘Why is it that the wild creatures we keep as pets always come to a premature and sticky end?’
I waved as he drove away. Meeting Donald was how I imagined it would be to meet one of the real-life children Arthur Ransome conjured into characters for his Swallows and Amazons books. Ransome’s books, like Maxwell’s, had captivated me as a boy. Reading them I’d wished I could somehow step into the stories, close the covers and fall away into the world of adventures they described. We are all frustratingly earthbound, destined to wade through the banalities of reality; brilliants trapped in the cotton wool of circumstance.
Seven
THE FALL
Ever since reading Maxwell’s first book, Harpoon at a Venture, I had wanted to visit Soay – the small island beyond the Isle of Skye that Maxwell had owned for a few years in the mid-1940s. Maxwell had used Soay harbour as a base for his shark-fishing boats, and a disused storehouse above the harbour was converted to a processing plant where the islanders cut up the sharks and rendered down the livers to extract the precious oil. It was an altogether vile business and not something the islanders were overly keen to help with. Maxwell poured money (his own and other people’s) into the venture but after only three seasons the company was put into liquidation, the island was put into receivership, Maxwell retreated south and eventually the islanders, like others of the smaller Hebridean islands, petitioned the government for evacuation.
The previous winter I had driven over to Skye and to Elgol and taken the impossibly steep road that winds down through the village to the slipway, where I parked and sat in the car looking over the sea to Soay.
Elgol, lying only two and a half miles across Loch Scavaig from Soay, is the village where an Englishwoman, Lillian Comber, went to live during World War II. Under the nom de plume ‘Lillian Beckwith’, she wrote a string of semi-autobiographical ‘comic’ novels about life in and around Elgol, the first of which was The Hills is Lonely.
Off-white clouds scudded across a pale blue sky. A fierce blustery wind batted gulls around the sky, making them appear drunken and disorientated. Gannets circled and dived into the frothing tossing sea, reminding me of Stuka bombers zeroing in on targets in all those World War II movies I’d watched as a boy. The car shook and rocked. Spray flew from the crests of tightly packed waves over the rocks and onto the road and the windscreen of my car.
I forced the door open, stepped out into the wind and a gust blew my hat far up a hill out of reach. The wind buffeted me this way and that as I bent into it and battled my way to the lee of the slipway wall, where stacks of creels, coils of rope and floats and plastic fish boxes had been stashed safe from the prevailing wind. Waves were smashing shoreward onto the slipway and spume – froth and foam like sheep’s fleece – came rolling up the slope towards me. I squatted low and looked out to sea towards Soay, where I could make out houses dotted along a road above a bay.
The figure-of-eight-shaped Soay, as an outlying island, has always lacked both a ferry service and public utility services such as electricity, telephone, piped water and sewerage. A livelihood was always fragile here. In June 1953 the SS Hebrides called at Soay, loaded the thirty or so islanders and their possessions aboard and took them south to the larger island of Mull, where they were given crofts and were able to find work. Only Tex Geddes, Maxwell’s friend from his SOE instructor days and the chief harpooner during the shark-fishing venture, remained on the island with his wife Jan. Tex, something of a local legend (he once threatened to eat the German laird of the nearby island of Eigg), bought the island from the receivers, became ‘Laird of Soay’ and until his death in 1998 wrested a living by fishing and breeding ponies. He wrote a book, Hebridean Sharker, about his time with Maxwell and after, drank hard, told stories and warned off ‘trespassers’ to his island with an infamous,
ferocious rudeness. Or so some say.
Tex is dead, another of the old Highland buccaneers who ‘lived it’, gone to his grave. Soay now is like many of the other small islands of the Hebrides – the Crowlins, Scarp, Mingulay, Noss, St Kilda. Where families once lived, laughed and grumbled; where children played; where there were once schools, working crofts, whisky and stories and envy and lust, there are now a few holiday homes and a smattering of part-time summer residents. The majority of these smaller islands, though, remain abandoned. Quiet, moribund; gone back to nature.
I hadn’t got to Soay that storm-tossed day. Only a few miles away across that raging sea, it was as unreachable as the moon. But that second summer, one fine day in August, Sandy and I tied a couple of borrowed kayaks onto the roof of his van and drove over the hills to Glenbrittle.
We paddled for what seemed like hours. We struck out for a distant headland, rounded it and paddled along under dripping fern-covered cliffs until we spotted the entrance to Soay harbour two miles away across open sea. We rested, drank and, refreshed, paddled on. The sea away from the coast was flat, dark blue, profound and sparkling; it blinded me with reflected sunlight. Kayaking in the main requires only brute force; arms and upper body propel the kayak forward. We powered on.
A sand bar at the entrance to Soay harbour was a contributing factor to the failure of Maxwell’s shark-fishing venture. His boats had to wait for the tide to be right before they could set out to hunt or deliver the carcasses to the factory. Business held up by nature. Sandy and I reached the bar just before low water and our kayaks grounded. The harbour was emptying out over the shells and sand. I followed Sandy as he shuffled and levered his way up and over the bar into the deeper water of the harbour. Above us a ram, motionless, stood sentinel on an outcrop of rock in the sun, watching us.
A small yacht flying a Dutch flag was anchored in the wide, sheltered expanse of the harbour. As we paddled past, two blubbery women in swimsuits, sitting in the cockpit drinking from cans of beer, waved lazily and disinterestedly. There was a square stone building with half its roof missing and a collection of entirely roofless post-World War II prefabs on the rocks above the harbour. We beached the kayaks in a dried-out cove and clambered over rocks to the buildings – Maxwell’s processing plant. What looked like the front end of a steam train, all inch-thick curved slabs of cast iron, rivets and rust – decades of rust – stood near massive galvanized tanks. Most of the prefabs were empty, their concrete floors cracked and decaying. One of them was stuffed with partially deflated, mouldering fishing buoys, crushed lobster pots, broken creels, scarred and scuffed plastic fish boxes, empty pots of paint and tools made useless by rust – a jumble of forgotten objects, left out for too long in the rain.
On the opposite shore a couple of wooden work-boats lay in the mud, their hulls splayed open like dried-up carcasses in the veldt. The whole site was a graveyard of long-forgotten items.
‘Some of this stuff could be useful,’ Sandy said. ‘I may have to borrow a RIB and come back and have a proper root around.’
For Sandy this place spelt opportunity, more stuff to hoard away ‘just in case’. But for me the sense of abandonment, of the end of dreams, was all-pervasive and total and depressing. I’d seen photographs of the site in books and magazine articles – men at work with long-handled flensing knives slicing up basking sharks; the heads of these mammoth fish being craned over the rocks to be dumped into the harbour; the area behind the buildings a boneyard strewn with discarded basking-shark cartilage. Not particularly pleasant photos to look at, true enough, but they were full of visceral life and death. Now there was just an end-of-days feeling here.
We sat on a patch of grass in the sun and ate sandwiches, the silence broken occasionally by a peal of girlish laughter from the Dutch yacht, by an oystercatcher trilling as it shot across the still green water below us. We hacked our way through brambles and head-high bracken to the other side of the island to take a look at the houses along the bay, but there was no movement there. The few houses that weren’t derelict were empty of signs of life or love – faded window frames and peeling wallpaper, closed and shuttered doors, dark interiors and silence.
Sandy was less loquacious than usual that day on Soay. ‘Sad,’ was all he said about the abandoned, Mary Celeste village. And he didn’t go poking about among the remains.
We picked our way back to the cove. The tide was rising and the sea had begun to lap at the kayaks, lifting and dropping them gently with every ripple it sent to bounce off the rocks. The Dutch yacht was quiescent. Soay’s ghosts slumbered on. Under light spotting rain we climbed into the kayaks and paddled away over the sand bar and back to Skye, where clouds coalesced and spilled over the Cuillins like foam.
Towards the end of August, above our small acreage, rainbows arrived. Double and triple rainbows were common. I’d be chopping or digging or weeding on a day of sunshine and showers and catch a cold wind on my face and look up to see a ball of dense purple cloud coming up the loch fast. I’d duck into the lobby of the house or the bothy to watch the oncoming spew of rain drench the island, listen to hailstones clattering against window panes, pattering on the grass in front of me. The storm cloud would speed on westwards to leave silence for a moment before the gusting wind returned. The sun would come out again and I’d see the rainbow – its brilliant spectrum of colours against the cerulean blue of the sky, its ends planted either side of the island in the indigo blue of the sea, a lone angel-white herring gull flying under the arch and away.
These squalls brought with them a quality of light that I have only ever experienced in India during the dying weeks of the monsoon, when the atmosphere has been rinsed of dust and pollen and airborne pollution and all that is left is clean, crisp air. On days such as these on the island I had a clear view across the Inner Sound to the Old Man of Storr on the north-eastern tip of Skye and to the Isle of Rona, twenty miles and more beyond.
On other, more autumnal days, the sun would shine milky, hidden by great wet slops of dawdling grey stratus cloud. A crack in this murk would appear and a fan of sunlight would shoot out to set a patch of sea aflame – angels’ torches, we call them, God’s rays come down from the heavens.
I had come to look forward to Pete’s visits after he’d taken a tour – the slam of the bothy door and the slap-slip of his wellington boots as he slobbed his way down the steps to my door. His visits were fleeting, he was always in a rush to be off, so I knew something was up when he knocked on the door and for once accepted my offer of a cup of tea and a seat to sit down in.
‘I’ve decided to quit as a trustee.’ Pete was never one to beat about the bush. ‘And I won’t be taking the tours any more.’ He wasn’t as well as he had been. Pete was of an age when the body starts paying one back for all the assaults launched against it during the early indulgent years. He had decided to let some of his responsibilities go. The trust was one of those.
‘And the tours cut into my day,’ he said. ‘In the morning I’m hanging around waiting to see if I have one, and after taking a tour I’m drained and just want to go home and sleep.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. But I was sad he was leaving, and told him so.
‘You’re just sad because you’ll have to take all the tours from now on.’
But it wasn’t like that. For all his bluff and bluster, Pete cared – about the island, about the villages and the villagers, about the community as a whole. And he meddled where many believed an Incomer had no place meddling because he wanted to help, and be of use.
Pete left and I walked around the island several times. The foxgloves, of which there were many on the island that summer, were fading, their purple trumpets dropping silently and unseen to the floor. Blackberries were on their way. I sat for a long time on the grass in front of the hide looking west to the isles in the Inner Sound. As the sun fell towards the hills of Raasay, I watched five gannets flying like ace fighter pilots over the Inner Sound, adjusting flight path and an
gle of descent as they wheeled high through the blue before checking in flight to fold their wings and dive, a splash of white, into the sea. They surfaced, flapping their wings like mad to clamber heavily back into the air, pick up speed, adjust angles of attack, then dive on folded wings into the blue once more. Ever since seeing those gannets taking such delight in the gale that day at Elgol, for me, they have become harbingers of bad weather.
I walked down to the lighthouse and stood in the wind on the gappy planking of the gangway. The tide was in. Lighthouse Bay was full of sea. Wavelets journeyed by beneath me. There was a crowd of people out in Kyleakin, strolling along the beach and laughing; kids playing football on the green. It was one of those restless evenings when the villagers, reluctant to go indoors, roved about until well after dusk. The summer solstice was a distant memory. The days were getting shorter.
Two weeks later, two weeks into September, during a conversation with one of the trustees, I heard the words I would have seen coming if my dreaming head hadn’t been elsewhere that summer.
‘We were turned down for funding by all the organizations we applied to. It was felt our needs are not as great as some of the other applicants. I’m not sure where that leaves you.’
I’d become as emotionally involved with the island as with a lover. When I was away from it I thought about it. I felt a responsibility to it, and I thought I had found home. But the island could never be home, not truly. I was a caretaker, a seasonal curator, nothing more. And I had stripped the newness from the island; there were no more secrets.
I didn’t know where I’d go, but that afternoon, with those few words uttered by the trustee, I felt sure that my time on the island had come to an end. I would miss it.