To the Island of Tides

by Alistair Moffat

  Looking down at the ruins of the priory, the red sandstone warming in the late afternoon sun, beyond them to the village, the fields of St Coombs Farm and, on the northern horizon, the grassy humps of the sand dunes, I began to see what Aidan had seen. If the Heugh was an altar made by God, then the whole island was His church. Walked by saints, studded with painted crosses, sanctified by prayer and self-sacrifice, Lindisfarne was a vast sacred precinct. God and not King Oswald of Northumbria had summoned Aidan to His island, the saint had understood His purpose, and His church was built not where the ground was easy but up on the windblown altar where the waves of the world broke on the hard rock.

  The sites of the summer digs had all been sensibly covered over and protected by the preserved sods of grass, which had been carefully laid back on top of the stone foundations. But I could clearly see where they had been. Close to the coastguard station, a very simple and beautifully cut stone bench had been built against the eastern wall of the Lantern Chapel and beside it stood an upright stone that carried an inscription, ‘Wild Lindisfarne’. At this place of Cuthbert’s end in 687, it reminded me strongly of the taller of the Brothers’ Stones, the place where his journey had begun more than thirty years before.

  I decided that it would be good to return to the stone bench on the Heugh after darkness fell and the island slept under the blanket of the night. Perhaps the silence would speak to me; perhaps in this place where the veil between worlds, between the living and the dead, is thin, I would hear history whispering. And I would return there in the grey light of the morning before the island awoke.

  Growing cold and stiff after my day of walking, I decided on a short, early evening perambulation, one with plenty of places to sit, a journey around what I reckoned were the favoured routes for those with little time on the island. Now that the tide had shut, these might be more accessible, more peaceful. On my way down to the western end of the Heugh and the stone stairs, I had begun to notice inscriptions, not only brass plates attached to the backrests of benches, something often seen in municipal parks, but also carvings and plates on gates, on walls and at entrances of other sorts.

  On a wooden field gate next to the priory walls, I saw something carved on the top rail in a font I recognised. I expected to read a biblical quote or something from Bede. But instead it was a homily from Robert Louis Stevenson, a truly great writer whose novels I devoured as a teenager: ‘Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant’.

  Most of the inscriptions I read were simpler and some very touching. On another gate close by, Peggy was commemorated as ‘a Friend and a Godmother’, the brevity eloquent. Along the road from the village to Lindisfarne Castle, probably the most popular perambulation for day-trippers, many benches line the wall by the road and most are variations on an insistent refrain: ‘Remembering Pauline Mary Cunningham of Nottingham, 1942–2009. She Loved This Island’. Again and again, those who donated benches so that others could sit down and gaze quietly at the view repeated similar sentiments, an enduring love for Lindisfarne. One recalled good times of a louder sort:

  In Memory of Banjo Bill Nelson, much loved Dad and Grandad

  ‘We’ll be going round the Island when we’re done,

  ‘And the merry Island rovers, Will all have big hangovers,

  But didn’t we have a lot of fun.’

  Another commemorative plate recorded a piece of recent history. On a bench close to the harbour:

  In great gratitude for the good welcome our five brave freedom fighters, Tormod Abrahamsen, Nils Havre, Sven Moe, Jan Stumph and Kai Thorsen, received here on Holy Island on 5th November 1941, after crossing the North Sea in a small boat. Presented on behalf of families and friends in Norway, 31st August 2010.

  After the German invasion of Norway on 9 April 1940, more than three thousand very brave men and women crossed the North Sea to join British forces or become involved in clandestine operations in their occupied homeland. Tormod Abrahamsen and his four friends pushed their twenty-foot rowing boat into the sea at dead of night near Kristiansand on the southernmost tip of Norway. In the dangerous waters of the Skagerrak, the heavily patrolled straits between occupied Denmark and Norway, they moved westwards, rowing without lights and probably without hoisting a sail, something that on the horizon might have given away their position. After three days in heavy winter seas, they made landfall on Lindisfarne. It was almost certainly a happy accident that saw their boat rasp up onto the shingle of the island’s shore. Britain is a very long target and with only a compass to guide them, they knew that if they held a steady westerly course from the mouth of the Skagerrak, they would not miss.

  The last bench I saw was the most affecting. Looking out over the harbour, where the crab and lobster fishing boats bobbed at anchor, I sat down to watch the shadows lengthen and the day wind down to its close. I felt my boots brush against something tucked under the bench and, creaking a little, I bent down to see that three bunches of artificial flowers had been attached to the lower struts with cable ties. Each had a laminated sheet attached with lines of verse on them, the sort of thing found on cards: ‘They say that time’s a healer, But that just can’t be true, For no amount of time could heal, The pain of losing you.’ Perhaps these were tied to the benches by people who could not afford to donate one, or had been told that there was no room to accommodate others.

  All of these inscriptions and the many others I saw seemed to be modern variations on the ancient wish to be buried in sacred ground as a means of having the sins of the flesh washed away and making the path to heaven less arduous. In life, most of these people came to Lindisfarne because they saw it as a haven, a place to run to when life became difficult, a place to grieve, or find peace or simply joy in gazing quietly over the glories of the sea, the sky and the land. The dead felt close on Lindisfarne, and as darkness fell I sensed their spirits in the air.

  When I called to organise my week on the island, my cheery hotelier had advised me to book somewhere else for supper since he only did breakfast, and apparently all of the hotels and other places to stay were full. There were three choices, reduced to two after a terrible lunch, and I had reserved a table for one at the Ship Inn. Earlier, I had bought a souvenir, a bottle of Holy Island gin, ‘The Spirit of High Tide’, and noted that it was an exciting 44% proof. The day’s exertions persuaded me to open it when I got back to my room, but I had left it too late to buy a lemon and I had no ice or tonic. Walking up the Marygate, I realised that I would pass the Ship Inn and a large sign told me that they were also the distillers of the powerful gin waiting for me. They kindly supplied me with ice, a bottle of tonic and the chef insisted that it would taste better with orange peel. He went off to the kitchen to fetch some and the barman waved away any attempt to pay. All very cheering and a sharp contrast with the rip-off lunch. The chef was right, and since they gave me enough ice and orange peel for two glasses, it seemed a shame to waste them.

  One of my earliest memories is of my dad coming home from work. The ritual seemed never to vary. In the back lobby I could hear him taking off his overalls and hanging them up in the coal cupboard before coming through to the kitchenette. My mum filled a basin with hot water and, stripping down to his white singlet, he washed his face, hands and forearms with great vigour, snorting through his nose and screwing his eyes shut against the sting of the green Fairy soap bar. As he dried off, my mum placed a heaped plate on the table and handed him a copy of The Scotsman. In those days it was a broadsheet, and once he had folded it small enough he propped it against the bottle of HP Sauce. This was what my mum called a ‘Reading Tea’. No one spoke as the food disappeared.

  Being alone on Lindisfarne and wishing to avoid conversation, I knew that all of mine would be Reading Teas, and so on my way through the darkened streets to the welcoming Ship Inn I’d brought my novel (Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game), my maps and my notebook. In a warm, softly lit dining room, surrounded by the chatter of other diners (
it was full) and the bustle of waiters, the dishing out and consultation of menus and the clatter of plates, I felt as though I sat in a bubble of silence, and to my surprise I liked it. I do like to work alone, partly because I don’t like to be told what to do or be constrained or distracted by others, but I did think I would miss conversation in the evening. But I didn’t. In fact, once I had finished an excellent dish of fried seafood, I asked for the bill so that I could get back outside into the quiet of the night.

  As I walked down the Marygate towards the harbour and the eastern end of the Heugh, I realised that the only sounds I could hear above the silence were the wash of the waves and the metallic clink of a wire halyard against the mast of one of the fishing boats lying at anchor. Back home on our little farm, the silence sounds different as the wind rustles the trees, the old house creaks and a horse whinnies in its box.

  Beyond the village, there are few street lights on Lindisfarne and the cloudy night made it difficult to see exactly where I was walking. So that I could climb up to the Heugh by the easy path at the eastern end, I had first to pass the harbour, and remembering my Chaplinesque ability to fall over or fall into things I used the torch on my mobile phone to light the way. Up on the Heugh the silhouette of the coastguard station was just discernible against the dark sky, and when I found the stone bench I clicked off the phone, pulled my jacket collar up and sat down. Having made my own covenant with silence, what voices might I hear?

  I had read part of an interview given in 1987 by a man who called himself Brother Harold. He had led a hermetic life and saw it as a battlefield of constant conflict, just as Cuthbert did. Most important, he had learned not to turn away from God when life seemed to overwhelm him and instead used silence to come to terms with what he called the noise inside his head. After a struggle, he gradually replaced it with the word of God. Reaching back across thirteen centuries to Cuthbert and his battles with demons, the links and the language are striking.

  As I sat up in the winds swirling around the Heugh, looking over the vast darkness of the sea, all I hoped for was to stop or at least quieten the noise in my head. I began to go over what I saw as the turning points of my life, hoping to discern some direction, perhaps even some purpose. The problem with that was my tendency to self-criticism, to focus on what I had failed to achieve rather than the good things that had happened. And yet that was part of the point of coming to Lindisfarne, my journey a mixture of pilgrimage and retreat. The island is a startlingly entire thing, a place apart which might offer me a detached vantage point from where I could look back over the sands of my life.

  When I was thirteen, I recall what I would now call an epiphany. Then, it was known as catching a grip. At primary school, I had been a disruptive child, unwilling to listen or learn or behave, and I found myself in the handcrafts class, making things like raffia mats – in between riots and fights. By contrast, my older sister, Barbara, was academically outstanding and eventually became Dux of the High School. A Latin title, the Dux medal is awarded to the brightest pupil in Scottish schools, and it is usually a reward for all-round abilities, sporting and performing as well as academic. My mum eventually felt compelled to do a brave thing for the times when all of her maternal instincts drove her to seek a meeting with the headmaster. She told him (I was in his study, instructed not to look gormless) that since my sister was clever, I could not be as stupid as I seemed, and it was the school’s job to get me to use my brains – to educate me, in a very literal sense. To my amazement, and horror, the headmaster agreed and I was immediately promoted to the A class and told in words of very few syllables by my mum to bloody well behave.

  I did, but only enough to survive and stay out of trouble. Very little homework was done, lots of lies told, and in those days of streaming and class rankings I was decidedly middle of the table, fifteenth out of thirty. But one evening, on my way to play or plot mischief with my friends from the old handcrafts class, I stopped on a path that led between the back gardens of our council estate. I can remember exactly where, and I gave myself a real talking-to, something about me deciding how my life would go, nobody else. I was not going to fail, be mediocre or be lazy. I was going to work, and I turned around, went home, opened my schoolbag and did my homework.

  Up on the Heugh, I took myself back to 1963 and that turning moment, asking myself if it really was as dramatic as it seemed in retrospect. I suspected it must have been. My exam results began to improve, I found an aptitude for languages I have never lost, I started to compete rather than mess about at sport, especially rugby. I played as a schoolboy against Wales and found myself at Murrayfield in the Kelso team at only seventeen. I still have the cutting of Norman Mair’s piece in The Scotsman that said I was the pick of the Kelso pack. And, not quite emulating my big sister, I was runner-up for the Dux medal at the High School. I remember my mum wanting me to ‘get on’ and ‘stick in’ so that I could live a better and bigger life than my parents. And I did that, but not only for them. I wanted it too.

  In the silence of the darkness on the Heugh, I realised that I had lost focus on the course of my whole life and too often concentrated on incidents, usually things that had gone wrong, times when I had made mistakes or been let down by disloyal people, going over and over them. That backward view had to change because I could not change the past, and perhaps in my week on the island I might make a beginning, see how I might pull back from seeing my life as a series of problems, difficulties with enemies I had made or people I had hurt.

  The wind began to whistle around the stone bench I was resting on and the wall of the ruined Lantern Chapel provided little shelter. Even though I was wearing four layers, including a warm woollen jumper and a good anorak, I began to feel the cold seeping into my bones. The eastern path leads to an old-fashioned cast-iron stile that gives access to a field next to the priory walls and, with my phone torch, I found it easily enough.

  Walking back through the village, the sound of the wind seemed to change. From a breathy, whippy whistle, it had begun to howl, like a pack of wolves, sea-wolves. I shivered, quickening my pace through the empty streets.

  9

  The Winds of Memory

  For much of the night, the strong winds rattled around my hotel and once or twice I heard something clatter, perhaps a chair from the terrace. When I’d booked my room, the cheery hotelier had adopted a surprising approach. ‘I only have one room free, but it is not a great room, no view, and you need to be very slim to use the ensuite facilities.’ I didn’t care about the view since I planned to be outside most of the time, but squeezing between the shower cubicle and the sink to reach the toilet was indeed a tricky manoeuvre. Despite that, and a lack of sleep, I scrubbed away my bleariness and stepped out into the half-dark at 6.30 a.m.

  I love the quiet of the early morning, and all of my adult life I have never been able to sleep in, have a long lie. That habit began on a January morning in 1963, the same year when I told myself to catch a grip. Perhaps there was a connection. Through some mysterious process – there was no interview or even any contact before I started work – I landed the plum job of delivering the Store milk, ‘the Store’ being the local Co-op. My mum worked in the ledger department, and perhaps her hidden hand had been at work. It paid 7/6d a week, a fortune.

  One frosty Monday morning, the alarm crashed me awake at 5.30 a.m. and, clutching a slice of toast, I found myself walking through the waking town to the Store milk depot. Turning up was vital, and there was no hesitation in getting up, no matter how cold or how tired I might be, because if the milkman, Tommy Pontin, had to do the round on his own, the milk would be late: breakfasts would not be had, apologies would be endless, and he would be furious.

  I liked walking through the darkened streets. I remember once seeing a woman at a high window brushing her long hair as she looked out over the winter morning and, seeing me walking below, she smiled and waved.

  Each morning, as Tommy clicked on the electric float and eased out of the de
pot, I met Jim McCombie, a schoolmate and neighbour. He delivered fresh morning rolls for the bakers, who had been at work since at least 4 a.m. I swapped a pint of gold top for four rolls, and as we did the first few houses Tommy and I munched them. I have been a hopeless addict to Scottish morning rolls ever since.

  The float made little noise as it whirred slowly along the darkened streets. With only the clink of bottles and Tommy’s incessant whistling, we seemed to fit into the early morning. The sleepy town woke up as we dinked a pint of milk down on its doorsteps; when the float glided past, a patchwork of lights clicked on in kitchen windows and the day began to stir.

  Perhaps milk was delivered from St Coombs Farm to the villagers on Lindisfarne in 1963, but in the half-dark of the morning the streets were deserted. The Marygate runs roughly east to west, and when I passed I could see dawn creeping over the North Sea horizon, the sun not yet up but its rays lighting the underside of high clouds, as strong winds chased them across the sky. A door closed somewhere, and out of the corner of my eye I saw someone in a yellow anorak turn quickly into the close leading to St Mary’s Church. A woman, by her walk. I followed the track around the graveyard, wanting to see if I could get across to Hobthrush, the little tidal rock offshore known as St Cuthbert’s Isle. The remains of a small chapel had been unearthed and what might have been St Cuthbert’s oratory, literally a place to pray, and in the seventh century usually little more than a stone enclosure open to the sky and high enough to screen out the world around. A tall wooden cross had been planted on the islet, but there was still too much water in the narrow channel for me to reach it. And so I decided to climb the Heugh once more to watch the sun come up.