The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  Within that, the hills slope in towards the Village Bay. To one side, the hills continue in a circle of blasted skerries, jagged points sticking out of the sea like a broken jawbone or the rusted-away edge of the giant’s bowl dipped into the sea. They were once part of the island but are now cut off by a channel forced through by the pounding sea. After that there is nothing but open water, all the way to America. Your eye then finishes the broken circle and travels back to the land at the other side of the bay.

  Into this natural harbour the deep-sea trawlers run for shelter in storms, unless the wind is from the west, in which case the Village Bay is useless against the gales that blow straight in, any boat thrown up against the rocks. The only hope in such weather is to shelter in the glen over the brow of Mullach Mòr that forms a mirror to Village Bay, though it is a place devoid of any human features other than some basic stone beehive huts, still used by the girls who go to milk the cows in summer and which may date back to antiquity, if Archie is to be believed. I have not gone so far as to see the glen myself yet, but I am told it is there.

  I have read this letter back and see that the above does nothing to describe the place adequately. I should have first mentioned the light. For we float on it in the sea’s reflection, the damp air luminous. The light encircles us, the far horizon all around us nothing but a deepening blue line of shadow where the water has ended and the sky begun. How the light shivers and shakes over the barley heads, or glistens off the swathes of silver-blue plantain leaves on the slopes by the sea. How the light brightens and darkens in racing patches across the land as the wind shifts the clouds across the sky. And the hundred shades of glassy light in the sea, dark petrol blue to faint jade, or the china blue over the white sand of the bay.

  By now you are probably thinking that being cast so far out into the Atlantic, I’ve begun to lose my marbles – and perhaps you’re right. This place never lets your senses be still, always waiting for the next trick of the weather, your head always filled with the din of birds and the wind.

  Did I mention that the sky is alive with bird wings? The black-tipped bent spikes of the great gannets’ wings, the flutter of scissorbeaked kittiwakes, fulmars, skewars, puffins, petrels – the same birds that supply most of the islander’s primitive diet.

  Even more birds reside on the two daughter islands, Soay and Boreray, and more still tumble and skirl in the skies around the black rock stacs that rise up out of the water like ancient relics – the head of a massive prehistoric shark, nose to the sky, another in the shape of a Neolithic hand-held axe – ancient and violent eruptions of lava plugs from before time. I will long remember our first sight of them from the tossing boat as we arrived, how they seemed to come to us, pitching and moving with the horizon across the sea like animate beings, and all the while the outlines of first Boreray, and then Hirta beyond, solidified and became green hills and slopes shattered all around with massive cliffs. Arriving here is almost the entry to a legend.

  And now back to where we are lodged here in the village. We are snug enough in the minister’s house for the time being, though as you can imagine it’s hardly Archie’s ideal set-up to be under the eye of the minister’s wife. He is even now planning for us to move out into one of the abandoned cottages in the village. There are two or three homes standing empty since the population here is not what it was some twenty years ago, and I sometimes feel a poignant sadness to think that I may well be witnessing the end of a unique and rare community that still lives as people must all have lived long ago. Cars or towns with their shops are unknown to them – even a bicycle is a foreign item here.

  Archie is away arranging for one of the village women to sweep out an abandoned bothy and hopefully for one of them to come in each day to make some food for us, though we intend to lead a very frugal existence here, all porridge and hard work. I know you have told me to not be carried along by Archie, coming as he does from a very different background, one with a certain expectation of life, whereas I am mindful that my own future relies upon much hard work. But it’s thanks to him and his family that I’m here and able to collect the research I need. Archie has been a true friend through these past two years at Cambridge, and you can see how much the natives here love him – though they can scarce do little else since it is Archie’s father who owns the place. Lord Macleod, who has covered all of my expenses in getting here, says he’ll be happy just to read my geological survey of the island in recompense. His father has not said as much but I can see that this is where I am to return some of the favour, in trying to keep Archie’s nose to the grindstone. Archie is to carry out an archaeological survey here for his dissertation, and if my task is to keep him out of trouble, I anticipate being rather busy.

  There’s a chance that you may see me back in Edinburgh before this letter gets to you, given how irregular the mail is going out from the island. And now here’s Archie coming along the path with the woman who is perhaps going to be our maid this next few weeks, a slip of a thing – though from the way she’s listening to him, arms crossed, eyes sharp on his face, I’d say she has the measure of Archie Macleod nicely, thank you very much. The native girls here are very scenic, rather fetching – ruddy cheeks, black hair – and they all wear the same homespun style of full skirts and turkey-red scarves that would not look out of place in Victoria’s reign.

  Now Archie is saying I need to get this in the mail sack. The Hebrides is due to return to the mainland within the hour, leaving us to our adventure as castaways.

  I remain, dear uncle, more grateful than I can ever say for all the care and affection you have shown me over these years. My own parents, had they lived, could not have been kinder. I look forward to seeing you at the end of summer.

  Your loving nephew,

  Fred

  CHAPTER 3

  Rachel Anne

  MORVERN, SCOTLAND, 1940

  My mother says I am her whole world, and she is mine, but all the same I would still like to know at least the name of my father.

  This much I know: that I was born on an island far from here, a place called St Kilda, although we left there before I could form any useful memories, so the island is doubly lost to me. My mother doesn’t like to talk about St Kilda. ‘There’s no use in looking back, Rachel Anne,’ she says. ‘This is our life now and we must make the best of it.’

  I was not much more than two years old when some thirty of us left the island. We had lived together all our lives in one village, sharing what little we had, but after the evacuation we were scattered across the mainland. It wasn’t long before many of the old ones and the children faded away from TB or from broken hearts, among them my grandmother. So now the loss of the island and our dear ones is too great for my mother to brook any questions from me.

  But everything is different since Hitler turned the world upside down. Since many of the men from round here have gone to join the 51st Highland Division, my mother goes off early each morning to manage the dairy on Brockett’s farm. She herds the cows into the yard with a stout stick tall as herself, calmly counting them in. She knows their names, sets up the milking parlour and sees to the milk churns. When I went over with her on the first day, Mr Brockett came to make sure she knew enough about the beasts. ‘You don’t need to worry,’ she’d told him. ‘On St Kilda, we used to walk miles each day to tend the cows. Wasn’t I raised on a croft where every stalk of barley had to be wrested from the weather?’

  ‘Aye, and you’d had to leave there for want of food. Well, we’ll give you a trial, Mrs Gillies, see how things go.’

  By the end of the week she’s laughing about how he’s so keen for her to stay on. ‘“Never seen the cows give so much milk,”’ she says, imitating his Morvern accent. ‘“What do you do, Mrs Gillies, to make such a difference?” What does he think?’ she says. ‘I know them each by name. And all of them different.’

  So with Mother away I am left here alone through the long summer days, instructed to practise my piano pieces. I
t was my mother who first taught me to play, my hands on hers, walking me over tunes she brought back from the island. She learned by ear and she thinks it a great thing that I am learning to read sheet music at school, taking the grade exams and so on. But there’s only so long you can play a piano in a day and so it is that I have taken to searching through the house for a scrap of information on my father, growing bolder in my search each day, until I stand on the threshold of her silent room. I walk in on the balls of my feet, as if she might hear me away on Brockett’s farm, gently slide open sleeping drawers, turning over her folded clothes and linens.

  Finally, I find something, hidden between the layers of an old rough blanket in her kist from the island. Pictures of antique-looking people in long, full-skirted dresses and men in flat woollen bonnets and thick mufflers, standing in front of a row of cottages – my grandparents and aunts and uncles from before the island was emptied. I think I may have seen these pictures before. I recognize my grandmother Rachel Òg, who came with us to this house. By her side, a man who must be my grandfather. I know well my mother’s stories, how he was famous for his skills in dancing sideways across the faces of the highest cliffs in Europe, his brother above holding the rope firm as my grandfather caught the fulmars and gannets whose feathers and meat kept the islanders alive. In the photograph, he stands solidly next to my grandmother. I memorize each detail and put them back, but as I smooth down the blankets, I feel something else tucked away at the end, an empty cocoa tin gritty with spots of brown rust. When I shake it, something light and muffled moves inside. I twist off the lid. It’s not been opened in a long while, the lid sealed with rust and damp. Inside, wrapped in a piece of pale ginger tweed and curved around in the shape of the tin, there’s another photo. I’ve never seen this picture before. It’s grey rather than the sepia of my grandparents’ photo, a blurred snap of two young men, arms around each other’s shoulders. Not island men, but visitors. They’re sitting on a hillside, the breeze ruffling their hair, a dog alert and panting by the side of one of them. I sit back, wanting to glean every detail, for I know with a conviction, feel it in my bones, that one of these men must be my father. I’m the spit of my mother, with dark hair and blue eyes, but all the same I’m disappointed that neither of them look anything like me. The conviction remains, however. Why would she have kept this, hidden it away, if it didn’t mean something?

  But the one person who can tell me is the one person I can never ask. The afternoon is fading. She’ll be back soon. My hands, like quick little liars, hurry to put everything away.

  Desperate as I am, it’s hard not to blurt out questions when she comes home. The ticking of the clock above the fire, the calls of the birds outside, grow louder and louder as she moves about the kitchen, saying little other than to ask about my day. More than ever, I want my mother to tell me about Hirta and the other little islands that make up St Kilda: Boreray, Soay, Dùn and the great rock stacs around them. But she won’t. I know that much.

  So I take my search elsewhere. Telling her I have homework to do in the library, the following Saturday I wait for the bus that twists and tosses over the narrow roads to Lochaline. And I am not disappointed. Is there anyone who has visited the island and not written a book about it? I read myself up and down the slopes of St Kilda, inside houses that are no longer homes, until I feel I must surely be remembering more of the island – though it is only the memories of Mr Martin, or Mr Sands or those who went to the islands in their fancy yachts, coming back with mouth-gaping tales about the last hunter-gatherers in the British Isles. ‘The natives are dirty but hospitable and wear bird skins on their feet. . .’ or ‘St Kilda, a simple utopian community from another century where money is unknown. . .’

  I go back week after week. When I’ve read everything I can from the shelves, then I ask for books mentioned in the bibliographies that the library does not stock but must order in from Edinburgh or Inverness. As the librarian stamps a two-week lending date in yet another book, I glimpse the pity and curiosity in her face. She knows. She’s realized I was one of the ones taken from the island, displayed for all to see in newsreel cinemas across the land, the last of the savages. I bend my head to hide my burning cheeks and I hurry away.

  At home I carefully hide my finds away under my bed. My mother hates to have the island pulled about by visitors and tourists in the books they write.

  But above all, when I want to feel I am back on the island again, I play the old tunes she taught me, trying to call up faint and jumbled memories from a small child, yellow irises by a deep stream, the silky coat of a puppy, of creased and kindly faces, of a lamp carried across the grass between dark bothies. I run my hands over the keys, over the hills and the slopes of Hirta. And sometimes I think I see those two smiling boys from the photograph, sitting there on the hillside.

  And I wonder, where are you now? Do you know about me?

  I’m listening to the wireless in the kitchen. We listen to every BBC bulletin about the war. Terrible news of late, the British forces pushed to the sea by Hitler, the men trapped on the beaches. My mother comes in and I’m about to tell her but she walks over to the wireless and turns it off, her face like stone. In her hands, I see the faded reds and greens of the library books.

  ‘Why are you reading these?’ she shouts, her face white. ‘These people know nothing about the island. You are taking these back to that library.’

  I’ve never defied her before, never raised my voice, but now I shout back. ‘Why should I? I won’t. I might as well have been found in a ditch for all I know about where I come from.’

  She holds the books against her chest. The back door is open and she suddenly goes out as if she needs to breathe the cool air. I follow, standing a little way behind her. She sinks down on the back step, the closed books on her knees. In front of us, the forest is already turning dark against the last brightness in the sky. I sit beside her on the stoop. A swift is swooping back and forth across the meadow, sewing the air together with its flight. I can hear the shushing of the pine trees beyond the paddock. She stares at them for a while.

  ‘Do you recall when we first saw trees, Rachel Anne? We’d never seen a single tree before we came here. You were afraid of them.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say, begrudgingly. More a feeling than a memory. I sit very quiet and still. Something is beginning.

  ‘Rather, it’s the bigness of the sky I miss. The island never felt small to us who lived there. Up on the cliffs, you could look out across the sea to the very beginning of the world. Or at least, it seemed that way to a child.’ She turns and looks at me so sadly. ‘You are right, Rachel Anne. I should tell you all the things that will be lost if I do not. Our people. You remember my mother a little perhaps, but my father, you never knew him. Such a kind man – though I gave him enough trouble. Just like you, I was never a child to be told.’

  The evening falls, and the step is cold. But we are no longer here. We are a hundred miles out into the Atlantic.

  CHAPTER 4

  Chrissie

  ST KILDA, 1910

  By evening, the whole village was searching for little Christina, calling her name against the wind that had risen up with the darkness, voices hoarse with the hope of finding her. She must be found, for it’s an island that has already lost too many children. No trace of a child in a blue woollen dress, not in the Village Bay, not in the Great Glen over the hill. Her mother even began to ask herself, could it be that a small boat had slipped in unseen at the edge of the bay, taken the child from where she slept as the women worked and gossiped?

  She didn’t want to think of a child being blown by the wind from the cliffs, the long drop, a small body flying like a bird, the sea below, so far away.

  ‘Christina,’ she called out on the top of Conachair’s cliffs. ‘Christina.’

  And her father yelled her name into the wind on the hillsides and as he lifted his lantern to peer into caves hidden in the slopes beneath Mullach Mòr. The stones echoed back n
othing but a muffled thrum, her name erased by the wind.

  All afternoon her grandmother had stumbled among the shore rocks and along the burn race of Tobar Childa, looking for – and hoping never to see – the long black hair and the folds of blue cloth twisted into the water’s flow that came down icy from the hills. She stood and prayed in Gaelic in the fading light, the old prayers against fairies and spirits.

  Where had the child gone?

  When Christina woke, some hours earlier, and looked out of the window she saw whirling flecks of white rising and drifting across the croft land. Snow or feathers? She’d only seen snow once before, little white clumps that drifted and rose against a blue light, the distance blurred by their swarm. If you stood out in snow it tickled your cheek, like Mother’s eyelashes when you held her tight to kiss her nose. Snow you could catch on your tongue, feel it sharp and melting, your hands pinched by the cold.

  If it was feathers, on the other hand, then the sea and the sky stayed solid and bright. Feathers made you cough and smelled burned and oily. The sun was coming warm through the window glass, the grass a deep green. Feathers it was then, the downy little ones from the breasts of fulmar petrels. The women would be sitting with Mother somewhere plucking at the fledgling birds, the beaks and soft heads dangling from the women’s knees as they worked in a cloud of down.