by Anne Cholawo
The first six weeks on Soay were so packed with new experiences and discoveries it was as though a whole year had passed. I still had no idea how I was going to keep financing this new life, but I felt determined to make something work. Somehow.
I had to sell my piano, I decided. I telephoned the couple at the B&B and, although they seemed perfectly happy to keep a second piano in their home for a little longer, I explained it would never be possible for me to get it over to Soay. They sympathised and said they would look out for a potential new owner. A day or so later, over a cup of tea and an enormous piece of cake at Soay House, Jeanne asked when I was going to bring my piano over. She had liked the idea of a piano on the island when we first discussed my furniture removals. I said it seemed impossible considering the size and weight of the piano. It would be difficult, she agreed. However, Jeanne was a lateral thinker. After a moment’s thought she said, ‘You know, I think the army might be able to move your piano.’
I had no idea what she meant. She explained that for several years the Royal Marines had been using the island for Young Officer Training exercises. They usually came twice a year, in June and October. Tex had been a commando during World War Two. He had also been involved with Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) training schools. These were secret camps dotted around Inverness-shire, training men and women as secret agents to infiltrate enemy-occupied territories and support resistance movements. Tex had taught boat and kayaking skills in the Lochaber district and this is where he had probably met Gavin Maxwell who was an expert in firearms and also taught in the SOE training camps.
Because of his commando past, Tex had invited the marines to exercise on South Soay. Jeanne explained that the commandos used helicopters to move men and equipment about the island and she thought that they might not be averse to airlifting my piano. I nearly choked on my tea. I couldn’t imagine why they would do that. She just said casually, ‘Oh, I think they owe us a favour or two, no harm in asking anyway.’
I thought no more about it. A few weeks later I was down at Soay House again eating more delicious cake washed down with yet more tea, when Jeanne let out one of her little naughty chuckles.
‘The captain in charge of the marine exercise is coming over tomorrow by helicopter,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask him about your piano when he gets here.’ I thanked her and went on sipping my tea. I still could not believe the captain would have time to nip over to Skye to airlift my piano. Tex had invited me to go fishing next day, so I wasn’t going to miss that; the weather was set fair for the whole week.
It was the end of another lovely summer’s day on Petros and we were heading back to the bay from Elgol when we saw a Royal Marine Lynx helicopter parked on the Carn Green. The Carn is a small but charming former croft house used as a holiday cottage, not far from Soay House. Beside it is the ‘Green’, a flat area of grass just big enough for a small helicopter. The Bryant family who own the Carn was in residence at the time and the pilot was busy showing their three children around the helicopter.
Tex decided he needed to get ashore quickly as the captain had obviously arrived to discuss where the exercise was going to be and when it would start. We rowed ashore and he left Biddy and me to carry up the dinghy and creels for mending. By the time we reached the Ceilidh Hall, Tex was coming out of the den with three men dressed in combat gear, just as you would expect of marines. But one of them had a mop of black curly hair and full beard, which looked very un-military-like. A moment later Biddy and I entered Soay House kitchen where we found Jeanne looking very pleased. She had asked the captain running the exercise about my piano.
The captain, who was not a marine commando officer but a regular army man, had said they’d actually just completed a PR job a little further south, flying equipment up a mountain for a mountain rescue team, using one of their own military helicopters. So he said he would take Jeanne’s proposal to the briefing session next day. I still didn’t believe it would happen, but a few days later I got a phone call from Jeanne to say, yes, the marines would move my piano. But they needed a grid reference, so could I please come down to Soay House to point out the B&B on a map.
It was a surreal experience. I was leaning over the map with two captains, one a Royal Marine officer, the other an army officer, discussing the terrain surrounding the B&B, and how best to approach it. The two officers decided I should contact the B&B as soon as possible. I had to warn them that a helicopter was arriving to remove my piano, and to ask if they would lay out a white sheet to mark their property for landing.
I phoned the landlady. The crackling line made detailed discussion difficult but once she understood that a helicopter would be coming to collect my piano she assured me there would be a suitable marker outside her house. She sounded quite excited.
I did not witness the event on Skye, but I do know that in the end it took two helicopters. A Royal Marine Lynx helicopter transported the soldiers who were needed to carry it, and set out the net which would hold it. But a Royal Navy Sea King helicopter had also been commandeered because only a Sea King was big enough to take the weight of the piano. The Lynx landed outside the B&B and the soldiers went inside to get the piano and put it into the net laid out ready for the Sea King. A line was lowered from the Sea King, it was hooked onto the net and the helicopter rose up, lifting my piano into the air with the Lynx following not far behind.
I had been waiting nervously near my house, peering toward Elgol as that was the direction I expected the helicopter (I was only expecting one) would be coming from. I heard the sound first, and it took a while to realise it was coming from the direction of the Cuillins. Then I saw them: two tiny dots over the very top of the mountains, just above the Inaccessible Pinnacle and Sgurr Alisdair. As they drew nearer I saw my piano swinging like a pendulum beneath the Sea King. It looked tiny, like a matchbox, frail and vulnerable. It wouldn’t take much for the whole piano to be shaken apart, I thought, as it spun wildly in the sky.
The Lynx landed the men on the beach not far from my house. The Sea King hovered noisily overhead, sending bracken flying and flattening the sea below it. My piano was slowly lowered onto the beach and the soldiers kept it steady while the net was released. It took six men to carry it up the beach and along the track. The gateway to my house was too narrow, so they lifted the piano bodily over the stone wall. They took it into the sitting room and asked me where to put it down. It’s still there, twenty-five years later, and not likely to move.
‘Give us a tune,’ somebody said.
Here was my chance. A real audience! I was nervous, and didn’t have a piano stool to hand, but I’d have to give it a go. It was the least I could do in return. The first few bars were enough to discover that my piano sounded like a veteran of a Wild West saloon – with bronchitis. Lesson number 365: pianos do not travel well at high altitudes suspended in a net. There was a polite, embarrassed mumbling from the audience as I closed the lid. Ah well, I never did see myself giving recitals.
While all this was going on, hovering in the background was the man I vaguely remembered seeing coming out of Tex’s den a few days before, the one with the mop of curly black hair and beard. This time he was carrying a large video camera. He asked if it would be all right if he filmed the piano being moved into the sitting room. I couldn’t see any reason to object; after all, they were doing me a huge favour. We spoke for a couple of minutes, but I was too distracted to remember what we talked about.
Finally the men left, and I went inside to check over the piano. It still looked in one piece and that seemed something of a miracle. The panels were held in place with small pegs that could be turned by hand for easy removal. If any of the pegs had shaken loose while the piano was hanging high over the Cuillin Mountains it would have ended up as a pile of good quality firewood. I unhooked the top panels so I could see the ‘harp’ inside. The damper had detached itself and was rattling around inside. The violent journey had also loosened the piano wires so all the keys were ou
t of tune.
‘Now,’ I thought, ‘all I need to do is find a piano tuner.’ I added it to my ‘to do’ list.
Next day brought another beautiful dawn. My new life was so full of interest that I was getting up unusually early. In my old life, whenever I had time off work I used to sleep the morning away. As long as there was no shopping, cleaning or washing to do it was my luxury and desire. On Soay the sounds, smells and long daylight hours had me hopping out of bed like a five-year-old by seven in the morning. So I was already up and doing when I heard the sound of a helicopter approaching at around seven forty-five. At first I took no notice – the island was full of marines exercising – until I realised it was hovering just behind my house. A few minutes later there was a tap at the front door. I opened it to find the curly-haired man with the camera I’d met the day before. He seemed nervous and a bit agitated, looking every so often over the top of my head.
‘Hello,’ he said, ‘we met yesterday when the marines were moving your piano.’
‘Yes, hello.’ I replied and waited politely.
‘You told me you were an artist,’ he said. ‘I haven’t slept a wink all night because I’ve had this terrific idea. I wondered whether I could look at some of your work?’
He spoke breathlessly and nervously, like a schoolboy. He seemed perfectly harmless so I invited him in and made some tea. He explained that his name was Robert Cholawo (pronounced Holavo) and that he worked for the Marines as a model maker. During exercises he took on the job of cameraman, recording mock battles and such like. However, he was also a sculptor in his spare time and had been thinking about having an exhibition of his work. He thought that perhaps some of my work might complement his sculptures, and wondered if I could show him my paintings and sketches? He kept peering around and craning his neck or glancing nervously at the doorway. Years later he told me he was expecting my burly husband to turn up and turf him out.
I didn’t have much to show in the way of work apart from my first few sketches and watercolours of seabirds in the bay. The first painting he looked at was my watercolour of a group of guillemots on a stormy sea-bound rock. Robert didn’t say much, but looked through the rest of the pictures. He told me that he had been planning to exhibit in the Falkland Islands as he had been inspired by the wildlife he saw there. He had made sculptures of King penguins and Antarctic cormorants and many other creatures unique to the Falklands. However, now he had been totally reinspired by Soay. Hearing that I was an artist, he had a new idea come to him in the night. Why not have a joint exhibition on this island instead?
He had the keen-eyed look of a fanatic. I was young, only twenty-eight years old, and my new life seemed to be dropping opportunities into my lap like a bag of sweeties with a hole in it. I did not find anything amiss with a complete stranger popping over by helicopter and offering me a chance to put my paintings into an exhibition. Somehow it all seemed perfectly natural for me to take this opportunity at its face value and accept it. So I did.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it would be best to ask for permission first though.’
We both nodded at one another at this good sense like naïve children. We might just as well have been five-year-olds meeting each other on a busy holiday beach. We would probably have shared a sticky sweet and spent the rest of the hot sunny day together playing by the sea with buckets and spades.
But Robert had to leave. The helicopter was coming back to pick him up, so we both went outside to meet it. We stood about for a few moments before it arrived, neither of us sure what to say next. Robert shifted around uneasily and tried to fill in the silences.
‘So, then . . . how old are you?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Twenty-eight, how old are you?’
‘Thirty-seven.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘Yes,’ he said, then added, ‘and I’m a happily married man.’
I always remember those words and am still not certain whether he wanted to reassure himself or me. Luckily, before we could get ourselves into any more conversational difficulties the helicopter returned. As it hovered low over the ground, we shook hands and he hopped aboard. It went up and wheeled away across the sea. I went inside, put on the kettle again and considered the events of that morning and the man I’d just met. He was mad, I decided, supping my tea. Yes, definitely mad, but perfectly harmless.
We agreed that I should approach Tex and Jeanne to ask about the possibility of staging an art exhibition on Soay. Neither of us had even considered where we would be putting our sculptures and paintings, or how people would get to an island without either a regular ferry or a jetty. I went down to Soay House that same day, as full of excitement and enthusiasm as Robert. I didn’t have to say much. Tex had been on the hill with a pair of binoculars. He had seen the irregular flight path of the Lynx, and went to investigate. When I arrived at the front door his face wore the expression of a border collie that smells a fox amongst the sheep: alert and full of suspicion.
‘I know all about damn soldiers,’ he growled. ‘I should do, I used to be one myself.’
I informed him that although Robert worked for the marines he was actually a civilian as far as I understood, but that didn’t seem to make a lot of difference. I then went on to explain the idea of an art exhibition on the island. They listened politely and in their turn pointed out all reasons why it just couldn’t work on Soay. Hearing them, I realised that deep down I had already known it would be impossible. I felt disappointed, but accepting, it had all been too good to be true. However, as usual Jeanne was thinking sideways.
‘You could try doing your exhibition on the Isle of Muck instead,’ she said.
I didn’t know where Muck was, so she explained that it was further south, beyond Eigg and Rum. Although the island was small, nearly half the size of Soay, it was good agricultural land with a thriving community. It had a jetty and regular ferry services during summer months. They also had a teashop, community hall and lots of summer visitors too, either from ferryboats or yachts.
The MacEwen family had owned the island for several generations and Jenny MacEwen, the wife of Lawrence MacEwen, used to live on Soay before she married. In fact, Jenny was the sister of Oliver Davies (his wife Donita had helped me with my coal delivery). Jeanne and Jenny had remained good friends and Jeanne was happy to ask Jenny about hosting an art exhibition on Muck. This was yet another incredible stroke of good fortune. I was only too grateful for Jeanne to talk to the MacEwens on behalf of Robert and me.
I had to wait a few days before I could telephone Robert as he had headed back to Devon with the marines straight after our first meeting in Glenfield. Over the fluctuating white noise on the line, I explained it would be impossible to stage our project on Soay, but Muck sounded feasible and the McEwens seemed open to the idea in principle. He was disappointed at first but soon warmed to the idea of Muck and offered to make the initial contact – Robert had staged exhibitions before, whereas my only experience was a two-week slot at a library in Luton when I was about eighteen. It would also be a logistical nightmare for me to try to organise a joint exhibition from an island with a monthly postal service and one shared telephone line.
My contribution would be to produce the posters and flyers. I still did Christmas cards and a small run in ‘funny cards’ for the first company I worked for after I left art college. They were a small print shop, specialising in fast turnover, low-cost print and design for small businesses, celebrations and personal stationery. I still had friendly contact with them so when I called they said they would be happy to do a small run in a single colour if I sent them the design. It wasn’t going to be a sophisticated design. I was limited by equipment, technology and cost. I would pay for the paper, but the printer said he would try to get the job done at the end of a print run using ink left on the rollers. They might be able to do it for free. I was grateful; my funds were running out. In the end we came to a happy compromise: they supplied paper, printing and ink without charge, and I p
roduced their company Christmas card illustration for free.
A week or so later, Robert telephoned to say that it looked as if we were definitely going to get our exhibition: Lawrence and Jenny had given us the go-ahead for May 1991. So I set to work with our poster design, and started to think about building up a portfolio of work to exhibit. I had hardly any paintings at all, certainly not enough to fill a room. When I worked out how many pieces that might take, I realised I would have to produce one painting a week until the following May. That would be impossible – given my other increasing commitments and day to day chores – so I mentally halved the number. But it still came to twenty-two paintings.
I had plenty of artist’s materials: rolls of watercolour paper, drawing pads, pencils, watercolour paints and pastels. I could start as soon as I was ready. I would have to.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Home bred and butchered
Long summer days passed in what now seems a happy haze of new experiences. Until I came to live on Soay I had no first-hand knowledge of farming. The closest I had ever got to livestock was on walks in the country. In my new life I soon found myself not only helping to round up sheep but taking part in slaughtering and butchering them too.
The ‘sheep chase’ or gathering was an important part of farming life on Soay where the animals roamed freely over more than a thousand acres of land for most of the year. There was only one way to get them down from the hills and that was with plenty of manpower.
Jeanne would hire two or three qualified shepherds and their dogs for the day. The rest were volunteering or commandeered inhabitants and the occasional fit holidaymaker or visitor. In fact, as I discovered, it was open house to anyone who fancied pushing his or her way through heather, bracken, deep grass and bog. The rewards were worth it. Once sheep were safely penned, Jeanne made sure there was plenty of food and drink for hill walkers and shepherds, and more often than not the evening ended with a good ceilidh.