by Dan Boothby
The weather worsened and the solemn hills were in silhouette by 7.30 p.m. The tours dropped off to virtually nil. The vegetation slowed up and shrank back into itself, into the earth and the rocks. The bird life on the island went through the change. The trilling curlew came once again to prod the shoreline at low tide and the eider ducks bobbed and oohed in the Inner Sound.
In the same week of October as the previous year, I heard the ssiiii of flocks of redwing rushing over the island in the dark. The strange little marriage of mergansers – absent since late spring – returned to feed around the shoreline, only the lucky drake had now increased his harem to three. The honeysuckle was still in flower, the dandelions still showed their leonine heads, buttercups still brightened the cobbled path. Blackberries ripened, shrivelled. The screeching terns had long since departed; sightings of razorbills, guillemots and puffins became increasingly rare. The seals were making moves, leaving for their pupping grounds. Montbretia flowers withered, then fell.
One low tide I spotted what I at first took to be an otter cub, down among the steep barnacle-encrusted rocks in front of the house. I stalked closer and from a vantage point on the rocks above, peered down at the creature. It munched a small dogfish, chomping and stopping every now and then to sniff and look around before chomping on. It was a mink. I was ten feet above it. It couldn’t catch my scent, but somehow it knew. It looked up, saw me, dropped the fish and set off along the rocks towards the old jetty. I followed. The mink stopped and glared at me, outrage all over its face. It held its ground, peevish, daring me to follow. Then it turned and trotted on to disappear into the rocks by the alder tree.
I found a drowned shrew in the plastic rainfall gauge that I kept by the lighthouse shed, and came across a field mouse floating lifeless in a bucket of water I’d left by the bothy.
Walking back to the island in the rain one afternoon after a visit to the Lochalsh Hotel bar I found a mouse curled up and cold on the wet concrete threshold of the door to my room.
On 18 October, a day of fine drizzle, I stood by the hide and counted fifty-five geese flying south. The following day I watched a hundred or more pass high over the island, jink, and head south-east down Loch Alsh. That same day, while sitting up in the bothy with the door open, I heard the unmistakable honking of swans, and rushed out. There were more of them than I could count, flying high, high overhead, in a perfect V, heading down the loch.
By the end of October the bracken on the island was long dead and the rosebay willowherb had reduced to desiccated stalks. The gorse was beginning to flower again, and gale-strewn leaves and rowan berries littered the island paths. By the end of November – the month of the dead – along with the last of the tourists, the house guests, the flowers and the summer, I was gone.
Virginia McKenna had sent money. The trustees bought a sundial to commemorate Johnny ‘Ach’ Macrae’s vision and vitality. A local man had engraved a brass plaque to decorate the dial. Johnny’s son-in-law came across to the island and cut a footing for the pedestal from a prominent rock on the lawn in front of the house. For a week, with Duncan wielding a stone-cutter and slopping around buckets of cement, it was like old times – shouts and machinery, lights blazing, doors open, celebratory drams drunk at the end of a day’s work.
John the chairman borrowed a Clan Macrae tartan rug for the unveiling on that mid-October day of wind and rain. Cakes and drinks were prepared in the cottage kitchen and I lit a fire in the Long Room. The trustees arrived, and some of their spouses. Johnny Ach’s widow and daughters came, and the new harbourmaster. Duncan trundled Johnny’s grandchild down the path in a pushchair.
And Jimmy Watt came, swaddled in wet-weather gear. A shock of white hair and a shy geniality. Now in his sixties, he stood in rumpled socks on the rug in the room where as a young man with his whole working life before him he’d stood once before. I’d wanted to meet him for years, to sit by a fire with a dram and listen to him reminisce about Maxwell and life down at Sandaig and the old days. But for people like him, the familiars of the famous – the Christopher Robins of this world – apart from those who like to bask in reflected glory, I think there must always be a But what about me? Everyone wants to know about the celebrity friend, or the immortalized family member, but not much about the familiar, who is merely the possessor of memories, a brain to be picked. And so I’d fought shy of bothering Jimmy Watt. And I liked to believe that my interest in Gavin Maxwell was that of a scholar and not that of a fan. I’d met enough ‘Maxwell nuts’ on the tours to divine a distinction between the fanatically obsessed and other visitors who had been moved or enchanted by the Camusfeàrna books and had come to the island out of curiosity. Some very strange people came to the island, lingering in the Long Room and sighing and telling me how much they wished they could have met Gavin Maxwell. I didn’t want to believe I was like these fans, but I probably was.
The invited that day assembled in the warmth of the Long Room driftwood fire. I sat on Maxwell’s sofa beside the fireplace, clutching a beaker of red wine, observing everyone and thinking: This is how it should be – a roomful of people and talk.
A trustee came and sat beside me. I liked and admired her. She was one of the old buccaneers. She had come to the West Highlands from England in the 1950s as a young woman with a head filled with the same romantic notions as us all. She had met Maxwell, had known Tex Geddes and had worked on boats with some of the crew from Maxwell’s shark-fishing venture. And she was a friend of Jimmy Watt’s.
‘Everyone says what a wonderful difference you’ve made to the island,’ she said, tapping her beaker against mine.
‘I don’t think I can stay on,’ I said. ‘I can’t afford to remain as I am, and if I find work elsewhere I’ll have to leave because I won’t be free to take the tours or work on the island. It’s impossible.’
‘I don’t think that would necessarily be the case,’ the trustee said. Over the years her English accent had mingled with the melodic tones of the Highlander. ‘The tours are almost finished for the year now and there’s little to do on the island over the winter. You’d have the time to earn enough somewhere to see you through next year. There’s always more than one way of looking at these things. If you really want to do something, as you know well yourself, you can always find a way.’
After an hour, after cakes and drinks and talk, John the chairman ushered us out onto the lawn where the Clan Macrae tartan was draped over the sundial. A strong south-westerly flung rain into our faces, drenching us. The streets of the two villages were deserted – everyone gone indoors. John shouted a few words over the bellowing wind in praise of Johnny Ach and removed the rug. We clapped. Someone took a photograph of Johnny Ach’s family standing behind the sundial in front of a backdrop of grey sky and green sea. Then we trooped back into the Long Room to stand in the warm and dry off and sign a card thanking Virginia McKenna for her cheque. People gathered up their things, got ready to go home.
As the others were heading out into the rain, a trustee standing beside Jimmy Watt called me over.
Jimmy and I spoke for a few moments, mumbling something or other about lightships and boats. He remembered I’d returned a document marked ‘Private and Confidential’ to him some months previously. He’d been busy, he said, and apologized for not thanking me before. Then we shook hands and he went away out into the wind and the rain. He has the hands of a sailor, or a builder – big, battered, capable hands.
That evening, as I was finishing tidying up the Long Room, I looked down the room to check everything was okay and caught sight of Raef Payne’s portrait of his friend hanging above the fireplace and a wave of sadness crashed through me.
This is all that is left: moth-eaten carpets, antique furniture riddled with woodworm, a handful of mementoes – a museum housing the decaying effects of a long-dead man, a fire long gone cold.
This is all that is ever left. You’re born, you blaze, you die. I didn’t even believe I belonged in the Highlands.
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sp; There were some jobs going with the Highland Council (water-quality tester, mobile-library van driver, a couple of others). I filled out application forms and posted them off, but I had more than a hunch that the employment gaps in my CV, along with my Incomer status and an appalling interview technique, would count against me. I attended two interviews and received two no-thank-you letters.
Three weeks after the unveiling of Johnny Ach’s memorial, Sandy knocked on the door of my room and told me to accompany him to the King’s Arms in Kyleakin. He had a proposition. I hadn’t seen Sandy for a while – he had a habit of disappearing for weeks at a time and never telling where he’d been or what he’d been up to.
We sat at a table in the saloon of the pub and I began maundering on about ‘the end’. Sandy pecked at his pint, suffering my whingeing with stoical indifference.
‘I’ve heard,’ he said, once I’d finally let it all out. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, where are you going to go if you leave here?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said and looked away out of the window. ‘It’s the end.’
‘No it isn’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’
I wondered if he was going to ask me to help renovate Ebb ’n Flow. But winter was coming. We wouldn’t get much done under all that rain.
‘Have you ever seen a mussel farm?’ Sandy said.
I sipped my pint, shook my head.
Sandy had ‘a good friend’, Dougie, who owned one on Skye and had some work going.
‘It’ll be a doddle,’ Sandy said. ‘There’s about a month’s work there at least. And I’m sure Dougie’ll have other work for you after.’ He wrote down a telephone number. ‘You can borrow one of my cars.’ (Sandy had several – all of them wrecks.)
As we drank on I painted a picture in my mind of myself as a tough roustabout character – all sea boots and stout waterproof trousers, out in all weathers, bashing through storms. I would become a Local, working alongside and accepted – respected even – by the Natives. I’d nestle into community life, make a real go of it, find myself a serene Highland lass, raise a family, stay forever.
As the rain-soaked afternoon drew on and the pub filled and the noise levels grew, as we sat staring through rain-spattered windows to the bridge and the island and Kyle opposite, after several pints of beer and numerous pipe dreams, Sandy let out a long sigh and said, ‘Folk come to Skye to let the rain wash away the past.’ He didn’t expand on this, just followed it up with a gentle nudge of his elbow and a waggle of his pint glass to remind me it was my turn to get the drinks in. I knew Sandy well enough by now to know he wasn’t about to let on what it was in his past he’d come to have washed away, so I pushed back my chair, pushed past the few shy tourists standing beside the merry-go-round fruit machine, past the rowdy Local lads crowding and crowing round the pool table, shimmied between the Natives on stools hogging the bar and stepped up, where the jovial, pink-cheeked barmaid spotted me, brightened further and came over to ask what it was I’d be wanting in the way of a drink.
I phoned Dougie quite late the following morning.
‘Aye well, we offered the job to Sandy but when we hadn’t heard from him . . . Can you come over tomorrow and I’ll give you a try-out?’
I lasted two days.
The first was sunny and still. Dougie and his mate and I motored in a flat-bottomed aluminium work-boat to a processing platform moored in the middle of a bay. Using a winch, I and the other man (who never told me his name and was probably right not to bother) hauled up strings which had hundreds of mussels grown large clinging to them. We manoeuvred the strings over a hopper and with gloved hands stripped them of their crop. The mussels fell into the hopper, where they were hosed, washed and conveyed through a riddle and grader into string sacks. Once we’d harvested all the strings in one area of the loch, we weighed anchor and moved the platform along to the next batch of strings. We did this all day. Factory work, I said to myself. Repetitive, but not back-breaking. I can do this.
I ended the first day full of confidence and renewed hope.
The next day Dougie told me he had a different job for me, the job he’d told Sandy about. I stepped into the work-boat and we motored out to a tired-looking wooden fishing boat, twenty feet long, fat and heavy, bobbing on a buoy. We climbed aboard. The wheelhouse, a tiny cabin forward, an inboard engine and a winch, had all seen better days. I kept out of the way while Dougie fiddled with the engine which, after a few coughs, chugged into life. Dougie aimed the fishing boat for one of the long lines of grey floats – like water butts lying on their side connected by lengths of rope – that lay in the loch. When we reached the floats, Dougie stuck the engine in neutral, leant over the side of the boat and knotted a short length of cord from the boat to the line of floats. Once the boat was secured he cut the engine and passed out some old waterproofs and thick rubber gloves.
‘You’ll be wanting these,’ he said. ‘It’s a muddy job.’
Silence overwhelmed us.
‘Now,’ said Dougie. ‘So you tie the boat to the line in the water with the cord like I’ve done, then you lower that hook through the winch and attach it to the line.’
It was a blue-sky day. A slight breeze was blowing onto the boat, easing it away from the line of floats.
‘Once you’ve got the hook on the line, you can haul it up with the winch using these controls . . .’ He touched a lever with a knob on the end beside the winch, and the line we were moored to rose into the air and was pulled towards the boat, ‘. . . but watch your fingers in the winch there. It’ll take your hand off.’
Once the line was suspended above the water, I could see that between every one of the floats there were eight coils of string hanging from the line. Each of these string coils had plastic pegs attached at intervals along its length and a weight on the end. Tiny baby mussels clung to the pegs and the string. The coils had been tied up with a finer piece of string.
‘Then you take this knife . . .’ Dougie pulled a blade from a sheath screwed onto the boat beside the winch, ‘. . . reach over the side of the boat and cut the wee string binding the coils so the line of babies hangs straight down in the water. Like you saw yesterday, once the mussels have grown full size we haul them up and harvest them.
‘Then you reverse the winching, take the hook off the line, untie the cord, pull the boat along to the next bit of the line, tie her on with the cord, attach the hook, winch the line up, cut the string off the coil, release the babies, and on you go again. We’ll see how many you can manage.’
Dougie’s mate had looked on silently all this time. I glanced up at him, hoping for some sign of encouragement. I didn’t even register acknowledgment.
After asking if I had sandwiches and a flask, Dougie and his mate climbed down into the aluminium work-boat and sped across the bay to the processing platform and started up the hopper.
To begin with I was enthusiastic, as I nearly always am when presented with a new challenge. I’ll show those boys, I told myself, I’ll win them over and they’ll slap me on the back at the end of the week and tell me they never thought the skinny southerner had it in him.
I got the hang of the job and kept an eye on my fingers, the winch, the ropes and the knife and worked hard and fast for four hours. I broke for lunch and sat in the sun and all that blue; felt the ache in my shoulders of real work, and it felt good. And at the pub at Isleornsay we’ll buy drinks and we’ll talk and laugh like workmates do and I will know I’ve been accepted and I’ll stay and make a life among you fine people.
Then the wind picked up and the work became punishing. I struggled on, bending over the high gunwales to haul the boat along while the wind hit it broadside on and pushed it away from the lines and the floats. The wind was too strong and the boat too heavy. For me. At about 3 p.m. my back and shoulders gave out. The last coil of baby mussels sank below the surface. I sat down at the stern of the boat.
Dougi
e had told me that if I got into trouble I was to phone him on his mobile. I tried him, but out there in the loch there was no signal. I stood and waved my arms at the men on the processing platform. Dougie and his mate carried on working. I couldn’t tell if they’d seen me or not, they were so far away.
‘I give up,’ I said, mostly to myself but perhaps to everything. ‘I give up,’ and felt wretched.
After some time the men motored across to me and Dougie came aboard.
‘There’s a crosswind, aye?’ He started the inboard and made for the mooring buoy at the end of the loch. We moored the boat, tidied up, and transferred to the work-boat.
I said: ‘I’m not physically strong enough.’
‘Aye.’
We thrummed across the loch. I sat in the front of the boat, out of the way. Dougie and his mate had turned themselves away from me and I noticed for the first time, as I sat hoping for some kind of sympathy, some acknowledgement, from those thrawn Highlanders, how so very broad their backs were.
I coaxed Sandy’s car back to Kyleakin and drove round to the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre. The trustee who managed the Centre was sitting in front of a computer screen in the office at the back of the building. I told her I would be leaving the island in a week’s time. She didn’t say much. She knew my circumstances.
‘We’ll be sorry to see you go,’ she said finally. It was what they all said: ‘We’ll be sorry to see you go and your work here will be remembered.’
During my last week on the island an abnormally high spring tide, the fallout from a strong equinoctial gale in the Outer Hebrides, lifted my dinghy from where I’d hauled it high up the slipway, ripped it from its rope tethers, dashed it against the rocks and dragged it down the slip into the bay. It was holed, terminally, fore and aft.
A few days later, Sandy and I sailed Emma Gaze to a boatyard in Broadford, where the old yawl was to spend the winter hauled out on the hard. Sandy had persuaded a woman who sang in the local Gaelic choir to come along with us. It was a rum day for a sail – cold, the wind blowing hardly at all. The rain fell softly, dotting the sea around us. We ghosted along with all sails set, hunched up together in the cockpit, the choir lady singing Gaelic laments in the rain. Once Emma Gaze was out of the water, Sandy and I unstepped the mast. Without it the yawl seemed tiny and forlorn, and looking at her it hardly seemed possible that something so small and so derelict could have given us all so much joy.