We galloped and galloped and whooped and yelled at the top of our voices. Not since Australia had I had so much open ground to gallop on. Firm safe sand. The hoofbeats changed tone as we moved from dry to wet sand, through patches of sand ripples and tidal-dimples and across the finest skimming of seawater. The horses were up for it, racing head to head, skitting sideways around remnant pools and jinking in tandem at things only they could see with their peripheral horse-vision. At the far end of Airport Beach, they came to a standstill and we laughed out loud. The evening had turned truly golden, and as we waited for the ponies to stop blowing, a slide of rainbow appeared above the red-roofed house at Crannag.
We rode back towards a woman cockling on her own. She leaned a full sack against a car which ran with rust onto the sand. Her face lit up as we got closer. ‘I thought I was seeing things,’ she said, ‘but right enough…’ Her words trailed off into a grin. ‘I like horses. I watch the showjumping on the TV sometimes.’ She shook her head, her smile fading. ‘Oh, but they put those horses through a lot.’ Her empathy was deeply touching. Alongside Orosay, we watched two Oystercatchers lose a battle with a Hooded Crow that flew away with an egg poised in its wide beak, its silver mantle shining like armour. The Oystercatchers were left calling in distress while up ahead the Hoodie landed and tottered triumphantly in the ragged grass. We got off the ponies and sat on some black rocks. Clumps of Sea Thrift were on the turn, flowers just past their best but still glowing pink near their centres. I felt grounded, melded to the rock. The flush of adrenalin after the gallop had left me spent and still. I could see Richard’s house across the sands, let my eyes trace the land-line back to the point, past old runrigs catching the low-flung light, past dots of Cattle, past Taigh Ciolla where Rob’s mother had come during the war.
On the way back, passing the pier at Eoligarry, the tide was so far out that Gerry’s oyster beds were fully exposed. Bladderwrack and Sea Lettuce draped the metal frames where the Oysters lustred pewter in their baskets. Oyster farming is non-polluting and sustainable, unlike many other methods of fish farming in Scotland. An hour later we’d be sitting looking out to where the hills of Rum were spun like gold in faraway sunshine, and a dozen Oysters would be going down smoothly with a squeeze of lemon.
Back at Rob and Kate’s croft I let Ross loose and went down to the corner of the field with my bead purse. I knew which one I wanted to leave here today, it was clear glass, grooved like a cockle shell: glass, glainne, that purest rendering down of sand. I carefully tied it to the fence under the primrose bank. On an impulse I picked out another bead and tied it alongside. This one was the same pearlescent baby-blue as the Sound of Barra in the falling light. A flock of Oystercatchers lifted in a kerfuffle from the sand, then settled again a little further off, all turning in the air to land facing in exactly the same direction. I took my phone out of my pocket and checked for enough signal to send a text to Martin. It wasn’t until after I’d sent it that I saw predictive texting had changed Eriskay to Erudita, which sounded like a lovely place to be headed to on the third Sunday in May.
DAY FOUR
Barra to South Uist
Booked onto the 15.45 CalMac sailing between Ardmhor in the north of Barra and Eriskay, we had plenty of time to explore the chambered cairns Rob and Kate had told us about. ‘Better than Stonehenge,’ they’d laughed, ‘but they can be hard to find.’
Armed with our map we drove back along the west road, took a right turn past Shuna’s postbox and carried on up the straight township road signed ‘Craigston’. We passed a house sign, ‘121a Craigston’. How did that work, I wondered, there were only a handful of houses we could see in this township, let alone 121?
We parked at the end of the tarmac road by a Bird of Prey Trail sign. Eagles are most easily spotted as they break the skyline, it told us, a good reminder to look up. We set off due east along the track. It was a soft grey day. Remains of houses came into relief on the hillside above us, thick curved walls splashed with lime-white lichen. The softer I kept my gaze, the more ruins I saw, lifting up out of that craggy hillside in a mute layering of rounded stones. It occurred to me that maybe ‘121a Craigston’ had taken into account these past dwellings, a continuous totting-up through the ages as bungalows sprouted below them.
Below the track, through the iron framework of a bed-end gate, sharper lines cut into the lower slopes of this glen. Telephone poles, pebble-dashed gable ends, Sky TV dishes, wind turbines, were all signs of a more comfortable way of life. I brought my focus back to the gate, where human ingenuity was visible at a micro level. It was held together by a concoction of twenty-first century fibres: flat webbing strap, the kind you get on a sheep dosing bottle, blue polypropylene BT rope, and green flatfish netting. They were all attached to gateposts that leaned tiredly and had lichen furring the sides that faced away from the sea. There were little pockets of shelter everywhere in this windswept glen. Beside us, the circular wall of an old sheep fank was brimful of Irises with yellow flowers just beginning to open.
At the end of the track we came to a set of metal sheep pens and walked through them to an old shieling. Its walls were four feet thick, the thatched roof covering was long gone but black roofing-felt, wooden battens and chicken wire were still present, and the stones that at one time would have held the thatch down. These were tied by their middles and hung along the eaves. The door was locked. We peered through a glass-less window into the gloom where a faint algae bloom greened the concrete floor between islands of rusted cans, a lidless aluminium teapot, and the cast-iron hearth. There were three chairs, backless, relics from a village hall perhaps, their laminated ply seats glowing electric seventies blue.
I straightened up, smiling. I liked this place. I liked its cheery demise, its graceful decay. The softnesses of black Moss pushed up like velvet buttons along the roof rafters. It lifted my spirits on this grey day. I got out the bead purse. There was no question, the large marble bead belonged to this place. I threaded it onto a piece of silk and wove it firmly through the rope that was holding down the thatch stones. The bead had a cream-equator, gradating outwards into strata of greys and silvers, and lay like a bright planet against galaxies of darkening Lichens and Mosses.
Shuna and I looked at the map, then looked up the hill and pointed out imaginary lines to follow, there was no path here. We stepped over old turf dykes, through constellations of Bog Cotton, across banks of Ling Heather and Deer Grass and Black Sedge. From the nose of the hill two faces peered down at us, a ewe with white face markings showing some Swale blood, and her black-faced lamb. She lifted pale eyebrows towards us, her lamb’s eyes lost in the pitch of its face. The pair blended into the monochrome of the leaning rocks. We’d found our Neolithic chambered cairn. As we approached the sheep moved off with a scrabble of hooves on boulders.
Large stones that once would have stood upright now leaned and lay in a relaxed muddle. We loved that there wasn’t a path, a sign, a fence; nothing to say what this place was, nothing to keep livestock out, nothing to be precious about. I sat down, spreading my palms wide across the thin lichen-crust of what I guessed was the tomb’s capstone. I closed my eyes, in no hurry to leave. Chambered cairns have long been a safe place for me, that was something I’d inherited from my mother, a love of standing stones. Her passion for ancient history was what first took Mum to Cairnholy in South West Scotland, the place I lived the longest when I was growing up, a whole seven years. I think it’s also the place that has most left its mark on me.
I lived at Cairnholy from 1981 until I left home in 1988 when I was sixteen, and must have spent hundreds of hours on the burial mound. It was my refuge, this Neolithic chambered cairn, officially known as Cairnholy II. From there the land sloped downhill towards the jagged outline of the standing stones at Cairnholy I, and beyond that to the Solway Firth. In the opposite direction rose Cairnholy Hill. At its base were flat rocks indented with eroded cup and ring markings. Above them the slopes lifted into the hill proper, its con
tours weighted with stone dykes, its face scored with the precise lines of sheep tracks through heather and bracken.
If it was raining, I’d crawl into the burial chamber with a book to be sheltered by the capstone. It looked precarious, the stone balancing there on three points, but it had stayed in place for over four thousand years. I felt safe there. The grass at Cairnholy was cut by Historic Scotland. The gate’s hinges were oiled, its wood given a fresh coat of Butinox every year. The dykes around the mound were well maintained. The ‘mowdy man’ came and dropped poisoned worms into the mole hills. It was a manicured place and there was signage, all of which I found reassuring. You knew where you were. Next to the mound was a pebble-dashed bungalow where Burt, the shepherd, lived with his family. There was gravel in his driveway and frosted glass on the bathroom windows, and behind those was Cairnholy Farmhouse, our home. There was no gravel outside our house, only bedrock. Stone steps, depressed in the middle, led down to the rough granite walls of the house. There was a door on the right into a coal shed, and straight ahead was the back door into the scullery. We only ever used the back door. Once inside you pressed a thumb-worn latch on the door on the right to enter the kitchen which is where life unfolded.
It was wood-lined halfway up the walls, and where the wood met the plaster there was a tiny shelf. All around the room, on this shelf, were Mum’s treasures: a dead Stag Beetle, a dried-out Frog, Fish fossils, a carved wooden figure, the size of a bantam’s egg, that when you tilted it forwards its eyes and tongue popped out on tiny ivory stalks. The kitchen was the warmest and best lit room in the house. In the early days the room was dominated by Tilley lamps that hissed and spluttered, and a rust-edged gas heater that sent out waves of damp warmth. Once the Esse was installed the gas heater moved outside to Mum’s jewellery workshop where its fumes intoxicated the tiny insects that lived in the wool-lined walls. They dropped by their hundreds onto her bead tray, or sizzled microscopically on the red-hot tip of her welder.
We all became slaves to the Esse. Wood collecting, wood chopping, wood carrying, and when wood was scarce there were coal and anthracite deliveries that gobbled the overdraft facility. Paul was the main labourer though. He’d leave his book-designing desk to go out into the coal shed and fill the scuttle. He’d riddle the stove feverishly until his glasses steamed up. His knuckles, red from the cold in his office, would become dusted with black and he’d have to scrub his hands before going back to the pristine pages of the latest manuscript from André Deutsch. A short time later he’d be back, and riddle again, until the air flowed and the fire burned hot ready for dinner time. Paul did all of the cooking. Most nights we had baked potatoes, onions fried with curry powder and canned tuna fish added at the end, a salad of iceberg lettuce. It was my job to make the salad dressing: two thirds sunflower oil, one third white wine vinegar, pinch of Colman’s mustard powder, salt and pepper, and ‘Bob’s your uncle’, as Paul used to say.
We’d eat meals listening to Radio 4. The 7 O’Clock News, The Archers and Front Row would usually coincide with dinner time. We heard all about the miners’ strikes.
‘You can thank your bloody father, he voted for that witch,’ said Mum.
Apparently, my dad was to blame for a lot of things other than the pit closures. He was to blame for the teachers’ strikes, for us not being taught Latin at school, and for us not being able to swim in the Solway Firth because of the radioactive waste from Sellafield. It was also, according to Mum, his fault that we were poor. She was constantly fighting him for more child maintenance. Sitting on Barra, my hands on the ancient stones, memory after memory was being upturned.
I’m sitting on a stool with Paul’s spittle landing on my face and he’s screaming at me: ‘Your father is a fucking cretin,’ over and over again. His face is getting redder, his lips wetter, his glasses flash. ‘Do you FUCKING understand?’
I must have broken down in the end or wouldn’t have been allowed off the stool, but I don’t remember. I’ve blocked it from my memory. I don’t remember Mum ever stepping in for me with Paul. I’d stand up for her and face the consequences, but that was when I still would have done anything for her. It felt to me like I got the brunt of Paul’s wrath. Tom had fishing in common with him, a passion that bonded them, and by then my older brother Will was living with Dad, which had happened quickly after Paul came on the scene.
Paul loved fishing. He and my uncle, Mum’s brother Robin, would spend days and nights on the Skyreburn and the Palnure. They’d come home late and sit at the table, their catch laid out in front of them. Robin and Paul would weigh the fish, gut them, examine the contents of their stomachs, discuss their markings, their age, sex, the pool they were caught in, the height of the water. With dirt-engrained fingers they’d open the jaws, feel the teeth, fan out the fins. This ritual would go on for hours while joints were smoked and pots of tea were drunk.
Paul took care of us. He got us up in the mornings with his nakedness hanging. I hated that. He’d shout up the stairs at us, come on, kiddos. He’d make sure we were getting out of bed, doubly tough in the winter when ice crystals had grown overnight on the duvets. He’d have toast ready on the table, and insist that we ate breakfast. He’d make us wear our coats and I hated that too, but it was a mile-and-a-half walk to the bus in all weathers.
Burt, the shepherd, would give us a lift if he passed us. Burt was softly-spoken and drove a pickup that started every time, and his sheepdogs wagged their tails at us. Tom and I would take it in turns to help him at lambing time. He taught us how to lamb ewes, and how to skin a dead lamb so it could be used to twin on another lamb. How to encourage a weak lamb to have its first suck. Sometimes he’d have us in for tea. In Burt’s house they ate oven chips and had central heating and fitted carpets. They always had chocolate biscuits in the tin, and they had a TV. Mum said Burt was a peasant on account of him wanting to cut down the Rowan tree in the sheep fank. I suspect it was on account of lots of other things too, pebble dash and teabags, for example.
Not being common was important to Mum. So was being interesting.
‘Why do you stay with Paul, Mum?’
‘Because he’s interesting, darling.’
She loved that he’d been a professional musician, a founding member of a band called The Third Ear Band. He’d rubbed shoulders with famous artists, made albums and played in Roman Polanski’s film, Macbeth. She loved that his music was avant-garde. He’d play his oboe for hours, music that made your jaw and knees tighten, and would come back into the kitchen with huge dark patches under his arms. His piano playing was easier to listen to, like having Radio 3 on. Sometimes I’d stop and listen in wonder at the music coming from the sitting room. The rest of us hardly ever went in there because it was too cold, but on Christmas Day we’d light the fire and go in and listen to records. Paul had hundreds and, sometimes, when the house was empty, I’d go in and play them. I remember the first time I heard David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. By the time the stylus had vibrated its way to the end of ‘Time’ I knew I’d passed through a threshold of no return.
I lived at Cairnholy for seven years, the amount of time your body needs to renew every single cell. In those seven years I spent a lot of time reading in a Neolithic burial chamber. I spent a lot of time walking in the fields, on the hill and down by the burn. I touched stones wherever I found them, smooth round damp ones in the burn, jagged dry ones in the dyke. To this day, the feel of a stone in my palm soothes me. I touched the trees too, especially the Rowans polished satin-smooth by Belted Galloway Cattle rubbing against them. If it was warm I’d press my face against the bark, inhaling smells lifted by the sun: sweetness of sap, muskiness of cow. In those seven years I had my first sexual feelings when my pony’s whiskers brushed against my neck. I grew up alongside my younger brother and fell in love with his best friend. I dreamed hard. I studied hard and when I was sixteen I left.
By then Mum had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. We’d heard her having epileptic fits in her loft bedroom
above the kitchen. Blood-chilling wails, like the sound of a rabbit screaming in the fixed glare of a stoat. Eerie. Inhuman. It was all my fault apparently, so Paul said. Best for everybody, really, if I left, and in the end I really wanted to go. There was no reason to stay, so it seemed. Post-brain surgery must have been a terrible time for Mum but, in the midst of all that turmoil, I left, carrying hurt and defensiveness that would never dissolve enough.
The last time I was back at Cairnholy was for Paul’s funeral in 1997. He had hanged himself in the barn where Mum found him with ‘a peaceful expression on his face’. She was still living with him, but the marriage was over. The animals had all died: the horses, the cat, the dog. Paul had nursed Mum through cancer, squeezed lemons and oranges for her in their thousands, learnt to drive and, after all that, had wanted a divorce. Suffering from depression he was prescribed antidepressants that were later linked to suicide. By the time he hanged himself Mum was already involved with someone else. She had, apparently, finally stopped being interested in Paul’s ‘interesting’. By then he’d taken to wearing his boxer shorts over the top of his jeans, and was surviving solely on sardines and brown rice.
Marram Page 5