by Anne Cholawo
I had also attended at least two concerts at the schoolhouse. Peter and William Davies were the sole performers and their costume changes and the different background scenery were very skillfully stage-managed by Anne and Gordon. A small mobile generator provided lighting and power for a large tape player filled with pre-recorded music as well as an electronic keyboard. The entire island population attended these concerts, usually produced just before the Christmas holidays. Tea and cake at the interval included. They were the highlight of the year.
Gordon and Anne had been part of my island life since my very first day on Soay. Not just during the dramatic events like the Burnside fire and the Sally B rescue but also in the mundane but essential practicalities: transporting supplies, shifting furniture, carrying coal, delivering the mail, maintaining the phone service.
It took me some time to take in what Anne was saying. She explained they were very disappointed at losing the school. That, and the fact that they both knew they were not getting any younger, made them decide it was time to leave Soay for good. I then absorbed another fact. I had become the last remaining resident on the south half of the island.
It would have been folly for me to spend the winter on the island alone. And to what purpose? Sally B was still not quite seaworthy, and my nearest neighbours Oliver and Donita were about a mile from where I lived. If I stayed over the winter I would have to get in my usual quota of coal, paraffin and foodstuffs. Without the use of Sally B, I would need the assistance of Oliver and Donita and Golden Isles. Also, without my own boat there would be no opportunity for me to earn an income to pay for these expenses.
With all this in mind, Robert and I decided to take the plunge of a committed relationship. We decided to try life together in his home in Devon for the worst of the winter months. In our different ways we were both secretly terrified of this experiment and had no idea how it would work out. Robert had only just recovered from a failed relationship and I had never been in one at all on a serious level. However, our fears were unfounded and we rubbed along just as well down South as we had done on the island. I had been concerned that our feelings for each other may have been coloured by the romantic circumstances on Soay, but it turned out they were made of more substantial stuff. I got a temporary job for the winter and took the opportunity to catch up with the twenty-first century. I signed up for a week’s course in computer skills, starting from the very basics of simply turning a computer on and off. I also got an up-to-date driving license and became reacquainted with driving. The only advantage to ‘civilisation’ for me was convenience, the ease with which I could gain important services and commodities – having an eye test at the opticians, buying essential new parts for my ailing Rayburn, or simply choosing a new set of waterproofs, could all be achieved easily and quickly. Yet, despite that, I still craved for Soay and I walked the familiar and loved places in my imagination over and over again.
During these winter months, we saved as much as we could and continually planned for our future on Soay even though at that time we were never certain that we could make a permanent life for ourselves together there. Robert had his work and his two children to think of. At that stage Jemma had just started college at the age of eighteen, and Luke, aged fourteen, was still at school. There was no possible way he could move to Soay permanently until the children had made lives of their own. Even then, we would need a much more reliable income than the one I had been trying to exist on.
We returned to Soay in March during the first week of calm weather to find a silent and sleeping island. Our port near to Leac Mhor – a cleared pathway we made each year up the rocky beach for bringing in the dinghy – had been obliterated by the winter storms. When I first arrived on the island there were four such ports along the bay below each occupied household, kept clear by constant maintenance. Now the shoreline had been returned to a tumble of rocks and seaweed by the remorseless sea.
There were various difficulties to overcome while Sally B was out of action. This was when Robert’s small four-metre Sportboat came to the fore. Somehow this rather diminutive Avon inflatable magically grew to accommodate our needs. It became our main transport for nearly three years. It brought over timber and supplies, a reasonable amount of coal and even passengers too. Robert had got into the habit of making several trips in a day to collect all the things required for general repairs and supplies. He was building a cesspit, putting in a proper water supply, installing a flushing toilet and a couple of gas-powered water heaters for instant hot water in Leac Mhor. Often the boat was so loaded up with supplies and materials it was difficult to see Robert at all, squashed behind sheets of corrugated tin, planks of wood and boxes of various necessities.
One memorable summer we built a raft. It started out as a joke, but as time progressed we ran out of options and had to look at the idea more seriously. Robert needed to replace the floor in the sitting room of Leac Mhor as it had become almost as rotten as my old kitchen floor in Glenfield House. He also wanted to install a sustainable water supply which would mean bringing six hundred metres of blue 25mm water pipe over to the island. As each new floor joist would be at least five metres long and fifteen or more were required, along with a considerable quantity of floorboards, it was quite evident that Robert’s Sportboat was not up to the job.
Without access to proper boatbuilding materials, we made the raft out of anything that we could find lying around. The base was an old piece of wooden pontoon, roughly seven metres long and one metre wide, which had washed up on the beach some years earlier. Flotation and stabilisers were provided by eight old silage barrels filled with bubble wrap and old fishing floats, or anything else that would add buoyancy. They were tied together with pieces of old rope salvaged from surrounding beaches. Robert built a crude transom at the stern of the raft to hold our two old Seagull engines and these were used to propel the raft. A couple of old plastic fishboxes were also bolted onto the stern to accommodate the anchor and provide a safe storage area. At Robert’s insistence we had two inflatables with outboards as an extra precaution to accompany the raft. Robert’s son Luke and I were in the safety boats; one was the Sportboat and the other an Avon dinghy and outboard borrowed from a generous holiday homeowner on the island.
As soon as the tide was right, and the shipping forecast promised favourable weather, we headed off. We made a successful but slow trip over to Elgol where we loaded wood and water pipes without any incidents and then headed for home again. On the way back, however, the raft, now carrying nearly a ton of cargo, moved along at much less than walking pace. About halfway across, both Seagull engines overheated and stopped simultaneously. Luckily, because of Robert’s good safety sense we towed the raft with our two ‘safety boats’ until the engines cooled down and could be restarted. It took us nine hours to do the whole trip. Not something any of us want to repeat but we did get the essential building materials over to the island.
It was increasingly obvious that we needed another boat. Sally B was being renovated slowly, but we had to have a reliable and substantial boat for our immediate needs, and we could not afford to wait indefinitely for Sally B to get back to work. We both agreed that a larger Avon inflatable was probably the most suitable craft. Most of the commercial boats looked far too frivolous for our needs; the boating magazines were really catering for the leisure market. However, we noticed that Avon supplied the military and oilrig companies with large inflatables for carrying men and supplies. They were simply called Workboats. They had a firm aluminium floor and a wide transom and the bigger models could hold ten or twelve people. They seemed very expensive to us but one day during our 2002–3 winter stay in Devon, while I was away working, Robert and Luke drove to Wales where the Avon factory was based to have a closer look at them and were both favourably impressed. After some discussion over the pros and cons, it seemed to us that one of these new Workboats would be a good investment, so we took a deep breath and bought one along with a brand new twenty-five-horsepower engi
ne.
This was just the beginning of our financial outlay. We needed three trailers for our new five-metre workboat: a road trailer and two smaller trailers for getting the boat in and out of the water on Soay. Robert customised the two smaller trailers by connecting them to make one long four-wheeled trailer. This gave it flexibility and stability but was lighter than a conventional trailer for our use. He bought a heavy-duty hand winch and some basic safety gear. That included two hand-held VHF radios and a hand-held GPS along with a big compass, a good-sized anchor with chain and rope, a grapple and several paddles. He put a couple of dry-stow containers into the boat containing flares, first aid, rations, spare batteries, tools and spare clothing. Then, using his old hand-operated Singer sewing machine, Robert sewed a bow cover and also a heavy-duty tarpaulin to cover the Workboat when it was on the trailer or on the beach.
By early spring of 2003 we had our back-up sea-going boat ready to roll. At the same time we had purchased a new vehicle. A transit van replaced Robert’s almost worn-out VW car. The van was powerful enough to haul our Workboat and its cargo the seven hundred miles north. What a difference this Workboat made to our lives on Soay! Once Robert had set up the new hand winch at the top of the beach and we had worked on the port to make it as wide and level as possible, it was relatively easy to bring the boat in and out of the sea.
Robert was keen to make a boat shed to hold the Workboat and trailer in case we needed to store it. We decided that there was no use skimping on the size of the shed and so we brought over enough building materials (on the Workboat of course) to make a shed at least thirty-foot long and fifteen-foot wide. This could hold the boat and trailer easily, plus several other dinghies. At the far end were a workbench and a partitioned area for changing in and out of our dry suits. Life jackets and boots were all stored there too. Robert had to hack out a large piece of bedrock to level off the floor and to accommodate the gable-end wall. The end result was a beautiful big shed at the top of the beach, leading into the bottom of the garden of Leac Mhor. Robert had already built a lean-to at the side of the house to hold the generator and a small workshop, but this had been his biggest building project to date. None of it – or any of our future building projects – would have been possible without the Workboat. Once Sally B became more permanently operational, we often took her and the Workboat across to Elgol in tandem. This enabled us to transport a substantial amount of supplies, particularly coal and wood, in just one day.
We had decided to make Leac Mhor rather than Glenfield our joint summer home. It seemed the natural choice. Leac Mhor was closer to the beach and it was therefore less effort to get our supplies to it. It had a quarter of an acre of fenced garden and a mature vegetable patch too. There was another big advantage. Leac Mhor was far easier to keep warm than Glenfield, not having a large extension at the back. Robert had put in a flushing toilet and cesspit and, until we purchased a stove with a back-boiler, he had installed a hot water gas geezer. Even though we could not see the possibility of living full-time together on the island for the near future, we both automatically planned ahead as if that day would come. Island life was changing and we were changing with it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Accidental self-sufficiency
While Robert and I made plans for our possible future on Soay, the island was going through another period of instability. South Soay farm had been up for sale for some considerable time. A steady trickle of people interested enough to hire the local tour boat made the four-mile journey by sea to view the island. There was even a Church organisation interested in setting up a retreat.
None of this was new. I remembered Tex and Jeanne telling me about the different people who had offered to buy Soay when they were struggling with paying compensation to the departed crofters, and the island itself was up for sale in the 1950s. An order of monks saw it as a potential retreat, and one man wanted to dig a huge sump in the middle of Soay to drain the bogs so the land could be used for farming. As Tex said, the island bogs were already draining into the biggest sump on the planet: it was called the sea. Lots of other people had unrealistic ideas for repopulation. There were also grand plans on how to make a good living but none of them really worked.
For the very first time, however, Robert and I began to realise that we were in an unusual position. Once somebody finally did purchase South Soay farm our properties would be bang in the middle of their land. With Tex and Jeanne this had never been a problem. Individual private ownership of the properties on the southern half of the island had been a slow but steady evolution and had come about out of necessity. The Geddeses had learnt the advantages of having independent neighbours and a mutually beneficial and unencumbered partnership with them had developed over time. Now there was no longer any continuity, no baton of experience to pass on and no common experiences to share on this part of the island.
Possibly unknown to any of the prospective buyers was the plethora of logistical problems they would face on an island completely devoid of even the most basic infrastructure. What infrastructure there had once been was already starting to disappear. The school and library services were only the beginning of the steady decline. Changes in the wider world were also reaching Soay. Ironically, because of a new Royal Mail charter, just as the population on the island was becoming dangerously low, the Sheerwater began to deliver our mail every Thursday instead of once a month. Without Gordon to meet the boat, Donita now took on the task of rowing out in a dinghy to collect the island’s mailbag. With a much smaller population, there was no longer a mountain of stores to be collected at the same time. However, the shop that we used to get our supplies from was sold off to the Spar franchise and could no longer cater for large food orders. Paraffin was no longer obtainable via the mailboat either.
Then came another blow. Sadly, Donita left the island early in 2004. Life on Soay is a very intense experience. I believe that it is often far more difficult to deal with the stresses and strains within a relationship on Soay than it is on the mainland. Long hours and days away at sea and other factors took their toll. Once Donita was no longer collecting the mail and Oliver was usually away at sea, the task of meeting the Sheerwater on mailboat day naturally fell to Robert and myself.
Many rude awakenings await adventurous novices setting up home on the island, as I would be the first to admit. A newcomer finds it hard to envisage the exorbitant cost and difficulties of transporting building materials and commodities – particularly if the new owner has ambitious plans. Life on a remote and under-developed island is beyond the experience of at least 95 per cent of people living in the UK. This was confirmed to us often as we listened to many of the prospective buyers we happened to meet. Their plans were usually so ambitious that it would have taken many hundreds of thousands of pounds to achieve them.
There are unforeseen social challenges too. People arrive on islands for innumerable reasons. They may live close together, but come from totally different directions, circumstances and with entirely different motives. When there has been some sort of strife or dispute on an island, I have often heard people on the mainland exclaim, ‘You would think with so few people in such a remote place they could all get on!’ As if distance from the rat race makes a difference in the way people behave. In fact, the smaller the population the more effort is required to achieve some kind of equilibrium. If beauty and nature really did ‘soften the heart of the savage beast’, the whole world would be a peaceful paradise. People are people, whatever their environment. Put a handful of folk in outer space for a few months and it would still be the same, even inside a very large spacecraft.
Robert and I often wondered whether we would be able to settle happily on Soay once a stranger took over the farm. We feared that it might be a very uncomfortable alliance and, when it seemed certain that the farm would soon have a new owner, we became anxious that our own future planning might prove to be a waste of time. As it turned out, however, the potential new owner of South Soay farm p
ulled out of the purchase at the eleventh hour and the sale fell through in December 2004. Even as we wondered if the whole process was going to start all over again, Duncan telephoned one afternoon to say that he had decided to split the farm into smaller crofts. Would we be interested in taking one on? We barely hesitated. This was an opportunity that could not be passed by, and in 2005 we started the slow legal process of taking on our first croft.
Three years earlier, in 2002, Robert had taken early retirement from the Ministry of Defence. By 2005, Jemma was at university and Luke was also away from home at a live-in job, so we were free to make our own plans. We married in November 2005 and with the security of Robert’s MOD pension, we were able to put his property in Devon on the market. In the early spring of 2006 we moved back to live on Soay permanently. One of the first things we did was to buy hens and geese.