I Am an Island Read online

  As the wind freshens with the hard edge of the season, the waves fall ever harder, dashing on to the rocks. We keep quiet and keep on working. We tidy up the rough ground. I am aware how infinitely more difficult this would be without Rab at my side. Crofting is about teamwork, and pulling together, each with a role and a willingness to work. About the effort of creating a system that is streamlined, in tune with the seasons and the cycles of the sun and the moon. As autumn tips into the early winter, some days the winds are up, the seas are too fierce and then the boats do not run. We pore over the forecasts and tide tables, planning for those times when we are likely to be unable to get to the mainland to stock up on groceries and animal feed supplies.

  We do not know anyone in Oban, so we rarely go out socialising there. Sometimes I browse in the local bookstore and charity shops, catching the last ferry home, picking at an eye-wateringly hot, vinegar-soaked wrap of chips, or I treat myself to a freshly dressed crab from its shell at one of the pier shacks. So although trips to the mainland for anything other than supplies are not frequent, with rough weather it somehow makes life feel tougher knowing that you cannot get away, even if, some days, just for a few hours, you might like to.

  It is a big moment when one afternoon the mainland haulage lorry makes it across to the island with a long-awaited delivery. ‘Please be careful,’ I blurt out, as old ropes are used to hoist it on to the dirt yard. I try to help as it is unloaded with difficulty and manhandled into the small kitchen and sitting room. I have bought the piano for a few pounds from an advert at the back of the Oban Times. When I run my hands over its keys I am astonished. It is undamaged, and has a beautiful action and tone.

  It takes time to customise your mental checklist to every eventuality. Inevitably, there are times we are caught out. There is no petrol or diesel pump on the island, and our low usage does not warrant installing an agricultural bunded tank. It is raining the day the Vespa’s petrol tank suddenly runs out, and too windy to cycle, so I wrap up in waterproofs and get soaked walking to where I need to be. The next day I take a jerry can in a black plastic bin liner across to the mainland but I have not filled out the necessary forms, or notified the crew, and on the return trip the full can is discovered and confiscated. In the end we piggyback on to a shared use of a boat and, on a calm day, we crouch on the wet boards and make our own fuel run, the motor chugging as the salt wash sprays across the wake and the cormorant huddle together on the seaweed-strewn, craggy skerries.

  Those early months on the island, time spins on a different arc. I sense how the landscape watches our own small lives struggling to fathom its rhythms. We start moving to a different pace, more closely attuned to the waxing and waning of the seasons, the birthing of calves and lambs, cutting of silage, fishing of mackerel and gathering in of the hay. Mechanisation has changed lives here, but not so greatly as on the mainland. Clearing the old stone barn, I find scores of cracked lanterns and tapering wicks. I learn that gas lighting replaced Tilley lamps and paraffin lints only in the late 1950s. Electricity did not light up the island until the mid-1970s. The carts pulled by great cob and Shire horses were replaced by tractors and, much later, by heavy haulage fuelled by red diesel that began to leave run-off slicks over dark puddles and potholes in which rainwater had once pooled fresh and clear. But the skies remain still and dark. Times have not changed that much.

  One morning, the sky darkens and the air subsides into a hushed silence. Lying in bed, I can feel the ridging on the roof shivering. I draw the blankets closer as the panes rattle and bitter draughts shudder through invisible gaps. Downstairs, the cold grate moans and hums. I light dried kindling and kneel in close, gently coaxing each guttering flame to ignite. When I switch on the radio, the forecast is for 150mph winds. All day I listen to the news and watch the barometer. The island is buzzing with the shipping forecast, which informs us in a flat monotone that strong winds will keep rising. Rab is on the mainland today. When he rings I learn that he is stuck there for the night, with winds and waves now battering our shores.

  ‘Tie everything down,’ he tells me, with an edge in his voice. ‘And for God’s sake, make sure the barn roof is tied on tight and secured.’ I grip the phone and nod, my heart beating fast in my chest.

  As I step outside, the wind is whirling with a low, gleeful sound, the branches thrashing about. When I look up I see that all the trees are bare. Where does a bird go when its home is destroyed? I wonder. And how do feathers stay dry or withstand this wind? I hurry off in search of ropes but find nothing that is not too short, or too thin. In the end I uncoil an enormous length of agricultural hosepipe and, climbing on to a ladder, I attempt to manhandle it over the roof of the barn. It is unwieldy and difficult to manoeuvre singlehandedly. At last, I manage to tip it over the ridging and feed it down the leeward side.

  I scour the yard frantically, searching for a suitable heavy object to tie it to and weigh it down. This presents its own challenge: the heavier the weight, the harder it is to lift. In the end I drag the Vespa scooter, Rab’s prized possession, from its shelter. I do not have the key and it is cumbersome to move. I am sweating with the effort, but fear and adrenaline combine to give me a strength I never realised I owned. I manage to wrestle it into position but I cannot hold its weight steady as I try to lower it down. I wince as it tips over with a crash on to the ground. There is no time to wonder if it is damaged. Battling with the wind, I struggle to secure another length of hose across the rear gable, heaving masonry blocks to secure it on one side and tying the other end to an old, rusting tiller that would once have been harnessed to a plough team. I pray that all this will hold.

  At midnight, the cottage starts humming with a menacing, low-voltage buzz. It is hard to place that sound. I cannot take my eyes off the flickering lights as they dim to a stale, sullen brown. I have no idea if the power is protected or if a surge could blow the fuse box off the wall. I realise I do not know how to put out an electrical fire, and that I should know this. It is disempowering staring at something you don’t understand. And frightening waiting to face the worst alone. Outside the trees are roaring, the storm is wailing and the windows are being buffeted with an incredible force. I feel a skin-prickling sensation an instant before the blinding flash comes, and then a deadening thud. The power cracks out. The darkness left in its wake is effervescent, alive and impenetrable. My eyes still branded by that searingly bright flash, I cannot see my hand in front of my face. But I can feel my heart beating in my chest. My breath in my throat. When my elderly cat cries and jumps up on to the bed, I hold her. It is comforting to feel her soft warmth.

  A few hours later, I am suddenly alert. The wind is still screaming; the cat is nowhere to be seen. I listen, my ears straining, fingers reaching blindly ahead of me as I move to the window. My breath quickens with a glistening fear. A shimmering white light is flooding the yard. A mains power line is down and the live cable is coiling, firing sparks, like a furious electric eel. Its glittering beauty is mesmerising. And then there is a crash and a slow shrieking of shearing wood. The cherry tree is coming down.

  Dawn comes slowly. For hours I sit on the wooden stair, shivering under thick blankets, my arms wrapped about me and my eyes fixed on that blinding darkness thrashing itself with its own whipping coil. It is a relief to see the skies lightening, wan and streaked pale. The power mast is split in half, but the white sparks, still strung high on the wind, are wrung out by daylight. I blow out my candle and go to the window to meet the dawn. I am glad my worst fears have not been realised, and the live electricity has not burned its way up the cable to reach the house. Later, it comes to me that, as I sat through those dim, glittering hours keeping watch on it in the dark, I was experiencing something significant. Fear is like that. It is incandescent.

  It reminds me how sometimes facing the thing you fear the most can be empowering and incredibly beautiful.

  When I go to open the door, the fallen tree is obstructing it, so I climb out of the window. Branche
s, leaves and debris are everywhere. I gaze around the croft. The exquisite quiet is shattering. As the cows walk up for their morning bucket of feed, I go to meet them. And, strange though it may sound, I am glad of their company. I wonder if, after such a night, they are glad of mine. I feel a new respect for the creative and destructive forces of this landscape and that, in getting through the night alone, I have passed some test or initiation. I pull the blanket closer. It is a relief to watch the sun as it starts to rise.

  5

  Graft

  We need work. We are draining our savings. There is an old saying in the islands that there is no contrivance against necessity. Regardless of our dreams of living simply, it is not possible to live solely off the land while we are still setting up and trying to finish the house. It worries me. I can feel hands reaching into pockets, drawing out bills faster than I can accommodate them. Piles of receipts stuffed into an envelope each week are building at an alarming rate. Existing close to nature is not for the faint-hearted: the reality is that sustainability comes at an eye-watering cost. Setting up from scratch is an expensive business, with precious little return on our outlays. It makes scant difference whether we labour ourselves or pay for the help that is required. Time has its own value and waiting is not always efficient when a job needs undertaking, especially when its purpose has a knock-on effect. You have to cover each element, seeing each task through from start to finish, or it is left half completed or botched. There are days when the croft looks at us reproachfully.

  Nature is forgiving but our own expectations are uncompromising. Each day consists of its own weights and balances. When you start reckoning the cost of living, you wonder where it all goes, and why it takes so much just to keep breathing. Some days it feels as if even the sky needs to be paid for. It is an irony that, day after day, I struggle to make sense of. The land throws up its gifts but it costs the earth to sustain.

  At the outset of each year we plan for every outcome, making forecasts and imaginative projections for every likely scenario we can envisage. We calculate our outgoings cautiously, writing down and crossing out each item. We budget meticulously for every penny and pound. But as the year runs on, we grow too blasé. We take risks. We make mistakes, waiting too long to acquire equipment that would make our lives easier, or splashing out on other kit that we could do without. It is a strange barter. You give yourself freely, but nothing else comes for nothing.

  I want to measure that exchange by some different gauge; to value farm machinery, or equipment such as gates, hurdles or cattle crushes, not by its retail price but by the minutes and hours of my own life. When you think like that, it makes you re-evaluate value. I am finding it helpful to slow time down into minutes. It makes sense of all the hours, days and years used to pay for our material possessions. I am calculating worth in terms of a truer currency. It is not just years of work we are spending. It is years of life.

  Looking at value this way brings a spiritual dimension to commercial dealings. Some days I wish we had thought of it earlier. Often, I think back to those first eight carefree weeks after we first landed on the island. The sky and sunshine were enough. Rab counters, ‘That was before we started living.’ But for me, we were living much more genuinely then. Money can be deceptive like that. You think it will always be there, only one day you look up and it is gone for ever. You think that running river will always carry you with it – until the day it runs dry.

  We are not yet at the brink, but I have a feeling it is not too far off. That nagging worry is always there, like a tender place you keep pressing gently, sounding it out with your fingers in the hope that you will find the soreness easing. But it does not go away. The few short visits from friends falter. We live less comfortably than others are used to. I am elated when my brother arrives briefly from Hong Kong with his young family. But, even though he says, ‘That was the best holiday!’, they struggle with the rough conditions and do not visit again.

  Rab is frustrated because we don’t have all the kit that other farms have. He is entitled to feel weary; it is hard work digging for days, or working by hand at what might only take a few hours to achieve with the right equipment or heavy machinery. We trade help for use of haulage when it is needed, but it is one aspect of self-sufficiency for which we are ill-prepared.

  ‘It’s OK. I’m sure we’ll get there, when we’re a bit more set up.’ But it is hard to pay for tractors, diggers, loaders and trailers and to convert the barn into a workshop when neither of us is earning. Rab is renovating the cottage, a job that has to be done. He is reluctant to take on other employment: he wants to live off the croft. ‘I didn’t come here to work,’ he jokes, ‘I came here to retire.’ I smile, but sometimes I hear it too often. One of us has to secure a payslip. I, too, would prefer to be on the croft all the time, so I have mixed feelings when my application for the post of a childcare support assistant at the island’s primary school is accepted.

  My job is to look after the nursery. There are only eight children in total enrolled, and at present that age group consists of a single three-year-old. It is only a few mornings a week. Every day the child and I put on our waterproofs, gloves, scarfs and hats, regardless of the weather, and arm ourselves with bumblebee-black-and-yellow walkie-talkies on a string. We roam freely, like swifts learning to fly on the wing. I enjoy my mornings but the job falls short in other ways. Whatever its rewards, sometimes I feel empty. It can be hard to see the children’s faces light up as their parents come to collect them at the end of the day. I am not blind to the unspoken understanding that the legitimacy of my being here in this role comes with the promise that one day soon, I too will help sustain the school’s small register with children of my own.

  There are the politics, too, that tend to go with any job. Some people are resentful that their choice of candidate, or a family member, was not given the position. Others want to sharpen their own dogma, political opinions and ideology. I learn to turn away quietly. Discussion all too quickly flares into accusations or argument if your accent is not local and, worse, from down south. It is tiring always to be watching your back. Yet as soon as you relax, you unwittingly make yourself a target. Sometimes it feels like a game. But we need the income, and I love the children, so I smile, and persevere.

  It is perhaps harder than it might be for others. I know I am different. Yes, I am English, but it is not just that. I never thought of my skin colour when I first arrived. My skin is sensitive so I burn in the sun, even if I tan. My hair is naturally tousled with dark, red, auburn and sun-bronzed strands. My mother is Anglo-Irish, and her family’s fabric is densely woven of Scottish and Irish Celtic threads. But my father, from the second of two generations born in South Africa, is of Asian descent. I always wondered how we have blue eyes and light skin on both sides of our family. As I delve deeper into my heritage, I find a suggestion of the clear, desert eyes of Kashmir or India’s north and western plains.

  Difference is scrutinised with circumspection on the island. A foreigner, approached outwardly with idle curiosity, is often mocked or pitied behind closed doors. A cold apathy or boredom meets my attempts to integrate. I am the stray dog.

  While colour is not something that is spoken about publicly, I start to dread break times at the school, which is always the time when these loaded topics are casually broached. It only takes a word or two to alert me that someone has something to say. So I wait. One question is aired shortly after my parents have visited for a few days. It is never easy when they come, but I am always sad when they leave.

  ‘Weren’t you ashamed to walk in the town with your father, when he came to stay?’ a woman confronts me in the kitchen.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he is a darkie. He is a coloured man.’

  I know there is more coming. So I say nothing.

  ‘You don’t see many folk like him, just walking about like that.’

  I have to hand it to her. It is true. You don’t. Only somehow it is shocking to
hear it. It casts a shadow between us. And, looking at her face, I know that this is a struggle for us both. And I wish I could make it easier. But I do not know what else I can say to bridge that chasm in our tolerance and understanding. It makes reaching an acceptance of each other harder to attain.

  Sometimes I question if it is worth it. The thin wage slip barely covers our bills. We need a way to supplement this meagre income. Rab is better equipped for work, yet he is fully committed to renovating the house. I sit down with a fresh piece of paper to draw up a list of my practical skills. I write down ‘child support assistant’. It feels a grandiose claim for someone in charge of one toddler in a school of eight pupils. Whichever way I look at it, I am that list’s basic flaw. I have no practical skills.

  I screw up the sheet of paper, sigh and start again. ‘Can you help me?’ I ask Rab. But he buries his head in his hands. ‘I’ve got enough to cope with as it is.’ I look at him and wonder.

  Eventually, I settle on writing a small ad on the back of an envelope. It is simple, discreet and to the point. ‘Gardening. Hoeing, weeding, planting: £8/hour.’ I am careful to keep it simple. I have no formal experience, just a love of the outdoors, two strong hands and a willingness to work hard. I walk a mile to pin it on to the noticeboard of the island post office and store.

  A few days pass. When the phone rings, I hear a strong, clear voice. It is a woman. She has an educated English accent. Yet it is not this, but the warmth in her voice that ignites a glow of recognition inside me. It feels like a ray of sunshine and brings a smile to my face. Some voices do that: they imprint themselves on your memory by how they make you feel. I will always remember that voice because of the way she says her name. It rings like a bright, clear bell. Cristall.