by Paul Heiney
The Pomona Cafe has not joined in, however. It does not feel as though it has been influenced by many of the cultural changes of the last half-century, or possibly longer. It is clean, but not spruced up; decorated, but not styled. It’s food has given good service for generations and sees no need to change. Food fads come and go but a hefty sausage roll or a flagstone-sized slab of Bakewell tart will always deliver. To a connoisseur of the egg and chip school of nutrition, and I have diplomas in the subject, this is the place to be. The Pomona’s name is writ proudly large above the stout door, built to keep out an Orkney winter, and its glass windows carry a cut-out image of a slice of sponge cake with cream and a cherry on top. Such is the place of my dreams.
But for all its toasties, bacon rolls and heavy-looking scones, this place is no throwback. Its present owner boasts of being the first on Orkney to offer reusable mugs – how woke is that? And his recycling of unsold cakes means feeding them to his hens, who lay the eggs he serves as part of his belly-filling breakfasts. I like this place even more.
The decor is uninspiring cream and brown, a bit civil service circa 1950, the tables covered in wipe-down plastic cloth, some clad with swirly Formica. The Starbucks generation might turn up their noses, but that would be their loss. The menu is short, to the point, and very cheap, and a large proportion of the customers seem to be those for whom pennies are scarce. And that’s what makes this place so interesting, for the overheard conversations betray real, and not tourist lives here. Many a conversation centred on hospital appointments. As a sop to modernity, there’s a swooshing coffee machine and an irritable grinder turning coffee beans into grounds, but cappuccino has made few inroads here and large mugs of strong tea rule the day. And no Danish pastries, just cake, in slabs and not mean little slices; a good place to read a paper in peace, toast in fist, while melted butter dribbles down your chin.
It was once known as Peedie Charlie’s cafe, founded by Mr Loretto Celli – Peedie Charlie was presumably his nickname, for ‘peedie’ means small. An Italian prisoner of war, I wondered? And how did he come to have the very first privately owned jukebox to be installed in Scotland? I was shocked to read later that the place was up for sale. I fear a moderniser will grab it. Please God, not. Someone save it.
That jukebox has already been taken to a place of safekeeping and a short walk from the cafe brings you to its resting place. Did I tell you that I love radios of all kinds? Transmitters, receivers, boxes stuffed with glowing valves; names like Ekco, Blaupunkt, Philco or Grundig. Anything with a bit of Bakelite about it and a tuning dial inscribed with ‘Athlone’ and ‘Hilversum’ will do for me. I have a short-wave radio on the boat, and a licence to operate it, and scan the airwaves some nights listening to fellow amateur operators from east coast America, or the depths of northern Russia. It’s a good community, us amateur radio operators. We are all at the mercy of ‘propagation’, which allows our signals to get through, or not, depending on unfathomable variations in the ionosphere, the weather, and even the spots on the surface of the sun. I’m a poor operator, though, not fully understanding the subtle ways in which antennas work, or don’t. So when I put out a call I am seldom heard. Somewhere on the boat is a tangle of wires and insulators and one day I shall sprout a proper aerial and then the world will be mine. In the meantime, I make do with Kirkwall’s Wireless Museum, as near to heaven as it is possible to be for someone who gets a deeper feeling of warmth from the sight of a thermionic valve than from any other form of heating.
What propelled old Jim MacDonald to start this collection back in 1983? It has everything from chunky grey military sets used in army tanks to tiny transistor radios with which a whole generation once hid beneath the bedclothes listening to Radio Luxembourg – the only source of pop music of the time, before the pirate radio stations shunted the stick-in-the-muds of the BBC into the razzle-dazzle of the 1960s with the Beatles, Stones and all that lot. It’s said that he wanted to show the importance of communications to Orkney during the Second World War, and even collected part of the old telephone exchange, which you can still see, and a suitcase radio used by a spy.
This was not the first time I’d seen this collection. Nearly 40 years ago, when sailing around Britain with our very young children, we stopped at St Margaret’s Hope on the south side of Scapa Flow. Intending to buy not much more than ice cream, we followed signs that led us to this collection in what was MacDonald’s home. We opened the door, entered his front room and heard the unmistakeable whistles and bleeps of old radios being tuned, then the hiss, pop and crackle of a 78-rpm record being played, a brass needle quivering in the grooves of a shellac disc, attached to a polished brass trumpet. In a quavering male voice, as all pre-war singers seemed to have, we heard a song of which the chorus went: ‘…for there’s nothing but smiles in the Orkney Isles.’ It seemed so cheerful and heartfelt a tune that it stuck in our heads, fondly remembered. But we never knew its origins, or who sang it.
Decades later, I stumbled out of the Pomona Cafe into the rain, and shuffled onwards to the new home of the Wireless Museum, now in Kirkwall. I found a single room, like the sitting room I remembered, stuffed with radios, telephones, loudspeakers, marine radio sets, the apparatus of chat. I heard recorded music from fiddlers, harmonicas and singers. And an elderly gentleman with a bloody nose of the kind you get after a fall was taking a ridiculously small amount of entrance money for such a treat. Politely, I said I was enjoying the music and it put a spring in my step and a smile on my face, and somehow improved the world.
The old boy would accept no sympathy for his fractured face, but told me that it was actually his own CD that was playing and it was himself singing and playing the harmonica. I bought one, and have played it a hundred times since, and it never fails to lift the mood if the sailing is proving hard work. I wondered if the old boy was called Billy Jolly, for I never asked his name but he appears on the CD singing a song I particularly recommend: ‘The Boy Who Put the Butter on the Old Man’s Bow’ is a tale of a wayward child who, on the Sabbath while his parents are at their devotions, decides to play his father’s violin but can only produce a scraping sound. So he applies butter to the bow to see if that will improve it. Being the Sabbath, and this being the northern fringes of Scotland, it doesn’t end well for the lad. It begins:
When I first tried a tune on me faither’s violin
Wi’ a dee a doo a durn a diddle-aye-dum-doe
All me folk were away on a summer sabbath day
When I skippet on his fiddle wi’ the old man’s bow.
Four verses later, he decides to shun the violin and take up the flute.
But a different song was on my mind so I asked, ‘Have you heard of a song which goes, There’s nothing but smiles in the Orkney Isles?’ He gave a frown and I guessed he’d never heard of it. Then he smiled, his lips started to move – ‘Let me see if…’ – and then, dragging every scrap he could from an elderly memory, he blurted the first verse before quickly moving to the chorus, which was the only bit of the song that had stuck in my mind. The verses were not great literature, but evocative and significant for me because at the time that I heard it we were at a turning point in our brave little voyage round Britain, and from now on we would be sailing in the direction of home. This news pleased the young children no end and was followed by a distinct outbreak of harmony in the family confines of a small sailing yacht. So I have good reason to appreciate that song. It has become a signpost in our lives.
It’s proper title, I now know, is ‘The Smiling Orkney Isles’. It was first written and sung in 1912 by Willie Kemp, who was a writer and singer of comic songs, often in Scottish dialects, and first achieved fame when invited to broadcast for the BBC in Aberdeen in 1923. His record label was Beltona, which specialised in Scottish music.
You can sing about sunshine in far foreign lands
Your sweet-scented woodlands or downs
You can sing about mountains or rivers and lakes
The prairie
s or streets in the town
But give me the place of the north Scottish shore
Where the wild surging grey-black North Sea
Meets the rolling Atlantic those islands among
And there is the one place for me
Chorus:
For there’s nothing but smiles in the Orkney Isles
Where the wild rugged shores pierce the sea
Oh what can compare to the peat-scented air
And salt spray that rise in the breeze
You can keep scorching sunshine in tropical lands
But give me the red midnight sun
Where the quaint old north dialect can only be heard
In the Orkney Isles second to none
To be happy is easy in these Orkney Isles
From the north to the South Ronaldsay
You’ll find it’s the same from the West to the East
From Stromness to Small Coppinsay
But those charming islands are all very well
Your heart will be soon in a whirl
Captivated you’ll be by a different spell
The charming Orcadian girls
Who cannot but love the Old Man of Hoy
Who warms every heart with a glow
St Magnus, St Ola whose spirits still ride
The rippling waves off Scapa Flow
Old history pages are lettered in gold
In the flagstones round Kirkwall’s big tree
So just give me help and I’ll try for no more
Than Orkney that’s all for me.
I would drink to every word of that song.
I left the radio museum, relieved now that an itch of four decades ago had finally been scratched. If I’d had the words there and then I’d have sung them all the way back to the boat.
Then another two figures entered my life in quick succession. The first I found within the St Magnus Cathedral, a sandstone edifice, parts of which have stood on what is now the main shopping street of Kirkwall for over 850 years. Critics have described the ‘finest example of the use of stones of two different colours’, which I am sure is the case, although a certain colour blindness on my part leaves me unimpressed, but I’m happy to accept that’s the reason for the ‘glow’ that gives it the name the ‘Light in the North’. The two coloured sandstones it employs are red and yellow, its guidebook tells me. It is a building that means business; a cathedral so mighty for a town so small. This must speak volumes about Magnus.
St Magnus was the sort of guy who refused to fight the Vikings and instead stayed on board his boat singing psalms. You might expect this would be a guaranteed way to have your head swiftly removed with a blood axe, but Magnus seemed to get away with it, for a while. It all went wrong when he was granted, by a king of Norway, an earldom of Orkney, which he was to share with his cousin Hakon. This was fine until both sides fell out and it looked as though the feud would end in battle. But Magnus’s only interest was peace on the Orkney Isles, so a truce was negotiated and the two sides agreed to meet on the island of Egilsay. Magnus, true to his word, arrived in peace with just two ships. Hakon, the bad lad in all this, arrived with eight and intent on settling this with as much violence as he could orchestrate. Magnus was overwhelmed, captured and condemned to death. But the executioner refused to deliver the mortal blow and Hakon, in a distinct display of total cowardice, ordered his cook to do the deed instead, the execution being carried out by striking Magnus on the head with an axe. Where he was buried, grass is said to have grown where it never flourished before and miracles were reported. Sanctification followed in due course. What are believed to be his remains were discovered in 1919 in a box found inside one of the cathedral’s pillars, the skull showing the deadly wound created by the axe.
St Magnus was my first new acquaintance here, but my second, and possibly even more inspiring, happened in the newspaper shop a few yards further down the road. On the shelf above the local newspaper, the Orcadian, which was stuffed with pharmacy opening times, ‘hardly used mattress for sale’, reports of a stranded whale, a farming suicide, a jubilant exam winner, and the upcoming events at every village hall on the islands, was book after book by the local writer George Mackay Brown. The titles were sufficient to have me scooping them off the shelf – The Masked Fisherman, Beside the Ocean of Time, Winter Tales, For the Islands I Sing. And his own take on these islands, Portrait of Orkney. There is no sentimentality in these stories and they can shock in the way they describe a crude and poor life among the islands. Especially the short stories, written poetically, affectionately and so vividly that it will not take you many pages to achieve a deep understanding of the nature of the Orcadians, their island lives, their loves and losses. The Norse folk were true storytellers, he notes in his biography of the islands, and then proceeds to unintentionally prove it by showing us what a master storyteller he is. In passing, I noted his exasperation with the ‘pedants and map-makers’ who forced upon the islands names they did not recognise. ‘One went so far as to call the main island “Pomona” which no Orcadian before or since has used…’ Except, of course, above the door of that cafe.
Reading in context, to have a book about the place in which you are immersed is one of the great joys I find in sailing, and to read Mackay Brown while not a day’s sail from Stromness, where he lived and wrote, is to give his writing a whole new layer. You can lift your eyes from the page and see around you what he was describing, and you think you might reach out and greet him as he stands on a street corner. He becomes your friend and guide, and the characters he describes are so real they could be walking towards you down these narrow paved streets. I bought half a dozen of his books, all short stories, and, clutching them, called once again at the dear Pomona Cafe for a refreshing tea and a rock bun, which truly lived up to its name. Then I started to read. A perfect confluence of place, tea, crumb and the written word.
There was a change in the weather, without doubt, and I felt it as soon as I emerged from the Pomona’s womb. The clouds were racing low and boat-owners were fussing over their ropes, checking their knots. It was going to blow and bring rain with it, for sure. With Wild Song tied securely to the harbour, the kettle singing, and the diesel heater giving its usual gurgles as it threw out a few therms, together with those books I felt as complete as it was possible to be.
Except for a further lack of real puffins. Fake ones you can find here aplenty. There is no escaping them as you stroll Kirkwall’s shopping streets, but they are caricatures on cushions, table mats, coasters, notebooks. Not the real-life puffins that I still craved. Alongside the Mackay Browns I spotted several guides to the birdlife of Orkney and I noted the places they were most likely to be seen. Westray was a good one, but I was not planning to go there. Nor to the next best, Hoy. Or Birsay. Surely my luck would turn. Just one puffin would do.
They call puffins ‘tammie norries’ here, and that nickname is also used to describe a stupid-looking man. But the puffins were making a fool of me, not themselves! Just to rub it in, I read that one in six seabirds breeding in Britain nest on Orkney. Annoyingly, Tripadvisor overflows with gushing reports of puffin-spotting here, tourists collapsing into emotional meltdown at the sight of these ocean comics. Well, I’m not laughing.
Ping.
There was a message on my phone. Crew was on its way. Malcolme’s flight was due the next day. At least one comic creature was coming in to land.
7
‘The sea goes up, the sea goes down’
Malcolme looked pretty grim, I’d say the worst I’ve ever seen him, bearing in mind he and I have rounded the lumpy waters of Cape Horn and sailed the sick-making Roaring Forties together, so neither of us is a stranger to each other’s looks of total misery. Unusually, I was feeling fine. Malcolme wasn’t.
‘First 24 hours are the worst,’ he spluttered, reaching for the sick bucket as we bucked our way to the north-west, bound for the Faroe Islands just over 200 miles away.
‘Yep, always like this first
24 hours,’ he said. Retch. ‘I’ll get over it.’
‘I was going to make a bacon sandwich,’ I offered unhelpfully.
Retch.
I quietly put the bacon away. This was a passage that was going to be easy on the store cupboard.
Malcolme is the sort of bloke you want on board when you’re setting off into wild waters and uncertain what you’ll have to face. I met him by accident after he wrote to a yachting magazine that reported I was planning a voyage down to the Southern Ocean. I’d hardly known him for five minutes before I signed him up; in fact, it was on Doncaster railway station, which happened to be halfway between where we both lived. I knew at once he was the bloke I needed for a tough sail.
‘Have you got plenty of tools on board? he said. ‘I like it when things go wrong.’ I decided instantly he was coming. No arguments. So he came to Cape Horn with me, and things did go wrong, and he fixed them, and if he couldn’t fix them he maintained morale. What more can you ask for in a crew? And he cooked a bloody good breakfast.
But not this morning. We’d been out of our bunks in the grey dawn around four o’clock on a foggy morning to leave Kirkwall to catch the tide north. But there’s a problem about leaving Orkney – the swirling tides hereabouts can make life difficult in whichever direction you turn.
‘We’ve got to look out for the “roost”,’ I shouted.
‘The what?’
‘The roost.’
‘What the hell’s that?’
‘Something that will make you even sicker,’ I replied.
Visibility was poor in the early morning murk, a dank and dripping day, making us cold to the core. The distant islands merge into greyness and I glanced from radar to chart then to the cockpit to find the narrow Broad Sound to the west of Shapinsay, then hoping to identify Gairsay Island before turning to the north-west to find Eynhallow Sound, one of the safe corridors of exit from the maze of rocks and islands. We moved at speed on a fast-moving tide, making for concentrated work. Mostly my work, actually. Malcolme, on my orders, retired back to his bunk, clutching, caressing almost, the sick bucket, as if it were the most precious object in the world.
