‘My mother was widowed in the war,’ Rob told us. ‘She came back in a convoy from India with her baby, and landed in Glasgow Docks. Taigh Cialla belonged to her husband’s family. She started writing this diary in 1945,’ he said, getting up and going over to a bookshelf. He placed the book carefully on the table. Written by hand above a grainy photograph of the house was Taigh Rudha Chialla. Below, in small typeface, by Joan Diana Brett. On the first page, beneath a faded watercolour seascape, lines of careful handwriting rippled across the page.
‘THE HOUSE stands on a low grassy promontory bordered by rocks. Rhudha Chialla, which reaches out to the tidal island of Orosay. On either side are great white cockle strands, Traigh Mhor to the south, Traigh Cille Barra to the east, covered at high tide for nearly a mile…’
We turned the pages with wine-edged delight.
‘There are forty crofts in Eoligarry, and the crofters’ cattle graze the hills and the machair, a fine lime-rich sward covered with primroses and other wild flowers in spring and summer. But this pasture is much depleted by rabbits, who thrive in their thousands and undermine the sandy soil. The forty crofting families of Eoligarry mostly do little crofting now, apart from cattle rearing, potato growing, but cockle gathering is now profitable again, and people are out on the strand every low tide, raking them up – some of them have fishing boats, fast and Diesel-powered, which go round the north point of Scurrival most days to work lobster creels out on the west side…’
Shuna pointed to a photo titled Barra ponies. There must have been two dozen, including foals, walking across the sands, their reflections intact in the still pools of water left by the tide.
‘Rob and I met on that beach when we were eighteen,’ Kate said. Her wide smile showed that theirs was a marriage still gathering momentum after all these decades. As he’d been doing all evening, off and on, Rob was back at the window with his binoculars. He didn’t say what he was looking for, but his watchful stance was imbued with fascination and love for this place.
After dinner, Kate took us up into the loft to see the workshop where she made a specialist marbling paper used in bookbinding and lampshade making. We ducked our head under sheets of paper pegged in lines beneath the low coombed ceiling. The process involves carrageen seaweed, which was used to make the jelly the paint floated on.
She poured this Carrageen into a shallow tray and with her small neat hands used a brush to drop in paint, naming the colours like an incantation as she went. Using a knitting needle and combs she created patterns on the surface before gently laying down and lifting a sheet of paper: lichen spatters on rock, curves of white and sorrel shell, sand ripples under thin sea, frayed edges of the whelming tide. It was all there on the wet paper, and on the others hanging pegged and crispy-edged: papery worlds rendered in indigo, cadmium red, yellow ochre, burnt sienna. Shuna and I looked at each other in astonishment.
We left holding precious samples of French Shell and Antique Spot lightly between our fingers, climbed the stile to Richard’s house and listened to the Corncrakes rasping into the opening night. A single sun-splash of gold held fast to the sky.
DAY THREE
Exploring Eoligarry
‘Beady, come on,’ Shuna shouted up the stairs, ‘they’ll be here in ten minutes, time for a cup of tea if you’re quick.’
Rob and Kate had offered us a lift back to Tangasdale to collect the pickup and trailer. Kate sat in the front of the Land Rover with one arm around several long brown tubes resting on her lap. Each had a handwritten address label, each contained marbled paper on its way to specialist bookbinders. We followed the road past the airport. The tide was out again, and I felt suddenly wide awake seeing that expanse of sand we’d ridden across yesterday. We drove past the tiny shell-lucent bay, where we’d taken the ponies’ boots off, and slowed before overtaking a bicycle laden with sacks of cockles. A broad-shouldered man was pushing it, and a woman walked on the other side, one hand steadying the bike.
‘That’s the Romanian family,’ said Kate, ‘on their way with today’s cockles.’ At Northbay she pointed out a small wooded gully beyond a kissing gate, saying there were some lovely oak trees in there.
‘And that’s John Pendry’s croft,’ Rob said, nodding to a thickly wooded area on the other side of the road. ‘He planted every single one of those trees. His house is completely hidden in there now.’ I loved Kate and Rob’s shared delight in the island’s scarce and precious woodland.
We turned right at the scramble of signs I’d marvelled at the day before: ‘Castlebay via east’, ‘Castlebay via west’, ‘Barra Airport’, ‘Eoligarry’, ‘Sound of Barra Ferry’, all with their Gaelic counterparts. Others were only in English: ‘Hebridean Way’, ‘Croft Number 2 Campsite’, ‘Mingulay Boat Trips’, ‘Barra Bike Hire’. We drove up the hill alongside Northbay Community Woodland – when we’d ridden here yesterday the scent of Bluebells had engulfed us – on past the old water mill, and Loch an Dùin where we’d had our post-traffic-panic picnic. Waving his hand towards a small stone bridge Rob told us that if we followed the river we’d get to Loch an Eich Uisge, the loch of the water horse. Local lore tells how the water horse would appear in the shape of a handsome man to entrap his female victims and lure them to a watery death. Then we were travelling down the steep hill past a boat high and dry in a cradle, past an old house crumbling delicately, its slates slipping onto the hillside.
We were nearly back at Tangasdale, where the banks of a burn had been built entirely of Scallop shells. I’d never seen so many in one place. I’d taken photos the day before of the gabians holding hundreds in place, their fluted edges sanded smooth by the weather. Shells like these still held the thrill of childhood for me, the draw of their size, tones of pink, the creamy white grooves inside. I remembered collecting them when I was small. When we came back from Africa Mum worked for a seafood export company on Anglesey. We’d sit for hours and hours in the car. ‘Wait there, children, I won’t be long,’ she’d say. Invariably she was. We’d get out and explore, collect scallop shells, treasure, some weathered and clean, some with little buttons of flesh still at the hinge. The whole place had stunk sweetly of a smell that still takes me back to a time when I doted on my mother.
I can almost touch the sense of her I had in my chest, then, when I was little and the biggest, most important, thing I knew was that love for my beautiful singing mother with her long red hair. I was always trying to catch her, and she was always slipping away. In the liminal time before a date, when she would be cheerful, listening to music, putting on her make-up, hurriedly putting us to bed, telling us to stay upstairs, she would tell us to ‘behave for the Mondays’, our babysitters. One of the teenage brothers would come over but, when they were there, I’d feel unsafe. Lying in my bed looking at the dark branches outside my bedroom window, the picture of a tiny red-hooded girl on my wall, I would ache for Mum to come home. The Mondays were scary, and to me most of Mum’s boyfriends were scary. I’d get stomach cramps when left on my own with them, always.
Those were the years between Mum leaving Dad in 1975 and marrying Paul in 1981. Decades later I read these lines of Sylvia Plath’s: ‘Out of the ash I rise/With my red hair/And I eat men like air’ and I thought ‘that’s Mum’. I’d loved and loved and loved her, in a bigger-than-me way, right up until I was in my teens. She was my role model and my idol and I hung on her words. I wrote gushing essays about her for English, but then she got sick.
It may be that around that time I would have gone through a natural disenchantment anyway, part of the ‘individuating from the mother’ that psychology books talk about. I wish it had just been that. A phase. Time to individuate. And then I could have found her again. But we never did really find one another again, not in a truly loving and accepting way. She had always made it clear she wanted us to leave home as soon as possible. I left at sixteen. I had been young for my year and had enough Highers for university. Perhaps she thought she was doing us a favour, and maybe she was, but
it compounded my feelings of being unwanted and rootless. I’d been happy enough to leave though. Mum was very ill with a brain tumour, which my stepfather Paul blamed me for. ‘This is all your fucking fault.’ I think at some level I believed him. It was definitely easier to go than to stay.
Willie Mackay the farrier talked to me in the barn before I left home. He put a hind hoof down and looked over my shoulder towards the house, his face red with exertion, and said, ‘She’s the only mother you’ll ever have.’ I think he was advising me against my plan to go to Australia to be a cowgirl. I was going though, encouraged by Mum. Once I left, I never felt close and safe with her again. Not really. I tried. She tried. We both bloody tried, but it wasn’t until she was dying, twenty-two years later, that I felt the unconditional love I’d had for her when I was little come back. It was agony and it was bliss, like blood coming back into frozen fingers. Feeling defensive and judged during all those years had been exhausting. Having hung on, white-knuckled, to stories that had served my insecurities, suddenly we were connecting again. I could let go, but I don’t think the feeling of being judged ever left completely. Even at the end when she couldn’t speak I would imagine the tracks of her scalpel-sharp thoughts, but I also saw that I might have been wrong. That maybe she was in a soft place. That finally, as she was dying, she could let her guard down. That it was safe for both of us to let our guards down.
As Rob and Kate’s Land Rover rattled its way round the Barra bends I closed my eyes around that image of all those stacked scallop shells. The scallop shell, as Alastair McIntosh writes in his book Poacher’s Pilgrimage, the story of his walk through Harris and Lewis, ‘is the symbol of pilgrimage. Its radial ribs converge towards the hinge, like pilgrim paths all leading to the sacred place.’ I was happy that our route through the Hebrides with the ponies wasn’t fixed, and I hoped that every rib of the journey would in some way or another bend towards love. I still had so many regrets. I mourned that my brothers and I hadn’t talked to Mum about her death while she could still speak. But we’d followed her lead. This woman who would speak about anything, anywhere, often toe-curlingly inappropriately, suddenly had an elephant in the room. Maybe she thought she was saving us from pain by not talking about it, as we thought we were saving her. Whatever way round, now it was hard to live with. I wish I could have heard her fears, her sadnesses, her joys. Instead, we talked small nonsenses, and then, one day, she couldn’t speak any longer and, after that, she lay for months with eyes brimful of all the slippery unspoken words. I did tell her I loved her, over and over again, but nothing could make up for the lost years. ‘Don’t feel bad,’ her friend Moira had said to me at her funeral, ‘your mum was impossible,’ but I did feel bad. I still felt bad. The farrier had been right. She was the only mother I’d ever have. She was there now though, enmeshed in who I was and who I had become, and I knew she was moving through me on this journey. I didn’t know where it would take us, but it felt good to have started laying down a necklace for her through these shell-freckled islands.
We reconnected with the pickup and trailer and drove back along the east road, collecting some supplies in Castlebay on the way. Shuna had been anxious that we’d be short of fresh salad on our trip, but we needn’t have worried. The Hebrides, it turned out, was the last glorious stronghold of the Co-operative. Outside the Co-op store were chunky recycling containers, the original forget-me-not blue paintwork hinting between welts of rust. I was taken by the writing on the side: Comhairle nan Eilean Siar/ Working Together for the Western Isles/ Market Stance Waste Transfer Station/ Isle of Benbecula. It wasn’t until months later, when I read Terry J. Williams’ book Walking with Cattle: In Search of the Last Drovers of Uist, that I learned that the Outer Hebrides had also been the last stronghold of cattle droving, and that they were still being walked to the ferries in the mid-sixties. There had been a string of sale stances through the Uists, and the Market Stance on Benbecula had been one of eight. Now they are mostly forgotten, or like this one, had undergone a change of use. I looked through the holes in the side of the nearest recycling container, all the way through to grey sky on the other side. Glainne, Glass Only. It would have to be a glass bead for Mum today.
In the community shop the smiling long-skirted woman told us that there was ‘a ceilidh on in Northbay tonight, pot luck dinner, from 7pm, if you fancy it’. We did fancy it, but didn’t want to make definite plans. In the fridge was some Barratlantic smoked salmon, produced by a shellfish seafood exporter based here on Barra. Possibly it was the same company Mum had dealings with. Several years and house-moves after working on Anglesey I remember her going off to Barra from where we lived in Dumfries and Galloway. She would be ‘dressed to the nines’ in tall leather boots and a suit, looking glorious.
We’d passed the sign to Barratlantic on the ponies the day before and I’d wondered if this was where she had come on those business trips. I’m sure there were ways I could have found out, but I enjoyed the fluidity of not-exactly-knowing. Over the next three weeks I would often find myself asking questions: Did Mum come here? Did she look out at that view, or lean against these same standing stones? Did she look for Cowrie shells on this very beach? Watch the Sanderling startle there?
Back in Eoligarry we sat at the long wooden table eating scrambled eggs. We heard the plane before we saw it, buzzing across the wide window-scape, listing around, veering back to the south west towards Glasgow with Kate’s rolls of marbled paper somewhere in its hold. The Twin Otter’s engine faded into the distance.
We spread out our maps, got out lists and notebooks and pencils, connected to the Wi-Fi. We needed to join some dots, do some route planning. It was a dance, going from map to iPod to phone to kettle, reading texts on the phone that were beginning to tip towards poetry: Re Iochdar. Gentle accordionist Billy McPhee will give you grazing. This house was built for stopping in, for doing nothing, for going nowhere. From the moment you sat down to take your shoes off, and read the words engraved on the bench Where is the time for contemplation, you had no choice but to slow down and be quiet. I loved travelling with Shuna for many reasons, but a major one was that we were both happy in silence. The long rides we’d already done together had taught us that.
The windows constantly pulled my gaze. I wanted to do route planning, but the urge to just watch and do nothing was stronger. A duck-speckle here, three kayaks there, a lilt of seaweed under the incoming tide or was it an otter, a pulse of wind, the Eriskay ferry gliding white-necked in the distance. Then a Swallow bashed into the glass. I went outside and bent over him, his tiny body stunned and panting. Our blissful view. His violence. I put him in a sunny spot out of the breeze, and half an hour later he had flown away.
The tide was high by the time we left the house. The plan was to explore some of the wing-like promontory of Eoligarry. We wanted to visit the medieval church at Kilbarr, built in memory of St Finnbarr, Chille Bharra in the Gaelic, and the dun, the Iron Age hill fort. Then we’d bring the ponies back to the house to tack up, having hopefully bought some oysters on the way. By then the tide would be low enough for us to go for an evening gallop on the Airport beach.
The medieval church was tiny and enchanting. It felt size-appropriate to Eoligarry whose only hill was 102 metres high. Primroses swamped the grass between the gravestones. Old carved stones, new polished granite stones, tiny plainsong stones leaning towards the past were decorated only with Lichens. Compton Mackenzie, author of Whisky Galore, was buried somewhere here. We sat and sat, listening to Skylarks singing, so high we couldn’t see them. The remains of two chapels in the burial ground were bonded with shell and lime mortar, salt-chalked Barra Snails grazed on the greenery between the stones on the gable ends. These Barra Snails would have been eaten by the monks of old and were now coming back into fashion as a delicacy. Strands of blue sky were breaking through above us and it promised to be a glorious evening. A camper van and its German owners arrived and altered the perspective of everything. We smiled a hello and left
quietly. It felt as if there wasn’t room for the four of us. We passed a newer, bigger church, St Mary’s, where smartly dressed parishioners were filing out from a Saturday meeting. Looking up at the skyline, we decided to give the dun a miss. Indolence was singing in our bones. We turned onto the track that led north to the ponies’ field with Lapwings hurtling around us in loops, crying their rubber-soled squeaks. We walked as quietly as possible on and out of their world. Ross and Chief had spotted us and were standing with their heads over the gate, keen and pristine against the sea.
We led them down through a tiny gate onto the beach of Traidh Sguirabhal. I stood on a bank of marram grass and got onto Ross’s warm back. His dark coat was a magnet to any heat from the sun. He took long strides between lines of empty cockle shells that had been left behind by the receding tide. The sky was reflected in the wet sand and birdsong rolled down to us from the dunes. Chief, silver-white as the clouds, shied away from the wavelets spreading rumours at his heels. It seemed both ponies were feeling good about life.
We left the beach where Eoligarry’s corpulent black-stone jetty juts into the sea. I waited by the gate of ‘Gerry’s house’ with Ross and Chief while Shuna went to knock on the door. A flurry of Rhode Island Reds clucked and ruffled in the wind and lines of bright washing flapped on the line. ‘Four dozen for £24, what a bargain!’ Shuna said when she came back, smiling and holding four red net bags full of Oysters. ‘I got two dozen to leave for Richard too.’ Back in the house I put the Oysters in the fridge, taking care to have their flat sides up. Shuna had explained that if you rest them on their curved side they are less stressed, and if they open their shells a bit they won’t lose all of their juices. You can keep them like that for a week, and if they aren’t eaten they can be released back into the sea. The ponies grazed in the garden while we had a cup of tea, giving the tide just a little bit longer to pull out.
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