The Lost Lights of st Kilda

by Elisabeth Gifford

  Christina knew she should wake Granny in her chair so they could go to the women now, but it wasn’t fair: the men had gone to get the birds from the cliffs and Father had taken Norman with him. The first time her brother had been allowed to join in with the climbing.

  ‘And me. I can come too,’ Christina had said, running to fetch her shawl.

  Father had smoothed her hair but he had left her behind and gone out of the door to discuss the day ahead with the other men. She saw them talking in a group on the cobbled path. They were up by number three, Neil Ferguson’s house, some of them sitting on the low wall with their backs to the bright sea, smoking pipes, sharing out the rough horsehair ropes, the jute ropes and the tackle, Norman holding a coil. Christina had sat on the step and burned to know what they were saying until Mother came out with a tin jug to tell her to fetch water from the pump.

  When she came back with the jug, the men and Norman were gone and now she had to go and find them up on Conachair, never wanted anything more, so fiercely could she see herself roped along with Father and Norman, bringing home fat armfuls of white birds. ‘Why, Chrissie, you’ve enough here to feed the whole village all winter,’ Mama would say.

  Granny was still asleep on the wooden chair by the peat fire, her chin fallen into the roll of woollen shawl around her neck. Christina lifted the door latch. Outside the bothy door, she didn’t turn right along the wide paving cobbles towards where she could hear the women’s voices singing as they sat together out on the turf, hands snatching at the white down fast as the wind. She turned the other way, walking past the old byre where featherless puffins had been left to dry in the wind, their beaks slotted between the stones of the walls, others hung in twos and threes from the ropes holding down the hump of thatched roof on the byre. Their wing feathers had been left on at the tips, fluttering in the wind as if the birds were dreaming of flying. She paused to watch a darting wren on the grass but he disappeared. All that was left of him was the whirr of his song. She’d always liked how a wren was so much louder and braver than their tiny body. A few more doors along and she’d slipped along the flagged path between a bothy and a byre, stumping determinedly up the hill. No time today to stroke the calf with his milky hay breath and his lumbering mother with her long ginger coat and horns wide as a boat.

  Above the peak of Conachair she could see the birds rising, white ash over a green mound of fire, the grasses not yet cut for hay, rippling green under the hot wind. On the far side, she knew, the cliffs sheared off the back of the hill like a loaf sliced by a jagged bread knife. That’s where the men would be hunting for fulmar petrels, where Norman would be close by his father, moving along the ledges and fastening the birds he caught around his belt.

  She’d watched as Father gave Norman his climbing lessons. She’d followed them to the little cliff face at the back of the village at the base of Mullach Mòr. Father and Norman roped together, Father going up first, his bare feet on the rocks like two more big hands, his toes gripping and pushing. Father said St Kildans were famous for their strong feet, their long toes. His face turned to Norman as he called, ‘Up there, to your right. No, the other right, Norman. See yes, pull up now and find where your foot can lodge. Only ever let go one point at a time.’

  Christina thought she would be asked to join in this game when she was big enough. When there was no one about, she had tried climbing up herself. She never got stuck. Not going up. Not coming back down. But after a time she saw that the women and the girls had different work to the men. The women went to milk the cows in the Great Glen, or chatted as they knitted and carried the peats, or sang as they turned over the earth to lay the seed potatoes. Or they sat with their red scarves flickering in the wind at the top of the cliffs, plucking a storm of white feathers while the boys wrung the birds’ necks and handed them to the women. They had plenty of work. But they never did go with the men to climb the wind-filled sweeps of Hirta’s cliffs where the birds sailed on the air in dizzy towers, filling the air with their cries.

  But Christina would go with her brother and the men. She made her way up to the summit’s crest with her short, determined legs. It took a long time, as it always did. Behind her the village became a toy, and then it was gone as she went over the brow of the hill and began the descent on the other side, her legs going faster now. There was the sea beyond the hill’s curve, bright blue against green, but no sign of Father or Norman yet. She’d had stern warnings from Father not to come here on her own, where the hillsides’ slopes were suddenly broken off into a fall of over a thousand feet, the ink sea fringing white against the rocks. But he didn’t need to worry because Chrissie was always good and steady on the hills. She’d only ever felt safe on the island, the sea below a blue quilt on a bed.

  But the slope was pulling hard on her now, making her legs run. She slipped, grasped to hold on to the grass that tore away in her fingers, a bird flew low above her, startling her with its cries as she felt the earth tip and she was rolling and sliding down towards the edge of the land. She twisted in the air, flying with the birds, too fast to feel any fear, the sea washing over tiny rocks far, far away. Then she felt the blows of the earth hard against her side as she struck and bounced and fulmars exploded from their nests in a frenzy of harsh jabbering.

  The last streaks of a red sun were going down into the ashen sea, a blanket of grey cloud smothering the last red flames.

  The men were all back from the cliffs, but the birds lay forgotten in a pile of soft bodies. Where had Chrissie gone?

  Dusk was falling. Lanterns all over the island, and you might think God would have helped with a bit of moonlight, but all he’d sent was his minister with his small lantern and his wife with another, calling for Christina because she’s out on the hillside awfully late. But there was no sound or sight of her. Too dark now to search but the men carried on. The women gathered back in the village, not speaking their fears, hoping that first light would not show a small body floating on the water down at the foot of the cliffs.

  The tides around St Kilda, as they knew too well, could keep a body close to the cliffs for days.

  Down on the cliffs looking out towards the long isle, something has disturbed the fulmars and their precious one chick of the season. They should be roosting in the dark, but they cluster in a flurry of dark wings in the air. Something they don’t like.

  Caught in a cleft between the crumbling cliff and a protruding rock, a blue cloth fluttering, matted hair. A bare child’s foot hangs in the wind.

  Christina opened her eyes. Why hadn’t they come for her yet? Darkness filled with wind all around her, just enough faint light from a clouded moon to see that she was in the wrong place, the sea too loud, and no sign of Father or Norman. She should get up and go to find them, climb back up, but she can’t move.

  It began to dawn on Christina that she was very alone. That it was very dark, and no one had come to find her.

  No one knew she was there.

  She began to cry. Fear is as big and lonely as the black sea soughing below. Perhaps they would never find her. When she could sob no more, she lay still and empty, staring up into a darkness that had become complete.

  Then a whirring in the air above. One small bird darted past in the dark air, a small body in flight alighting on the rock face. And then another, and another until the air was filled with a soft whirring sound, purring and fluttering, little home calls as the shadows of birds disappeared into their roosts between the cracks in the rocks. Storm Petrels. The little dark birds that dance on the waves like shadows and only come home to sleep when the dark falls. The air was alive, singing with the blurring of wings. The birds had come to keep her company, whispering their stories of the sea, crying out their tiny greetings. Lulled and mesmerized by their soft sounds and the little calls, she was no longer afraid.

  The dark was at its blackest, the air quietened, the birds home and sleeping, her fear gone, for she could feel something she had not understood before. She was not al
one: there was someone or something who would keep her safe, who bided with her, would always be with her. Ah, but her leg hurt and she was so weary. Her eyes closed.

  The dawn had drawn a ruby line along the bottom of the dark when she woke, a grey light beginning to dissolve the night in the east so that she could see the fulmars falling from the cliff above and sailing out on the wind, and oh, lanterns, coming down the cliff. Voices calling her name. She yelled back with all the force left in her, a poor dry sound. ‘Here, I’m here. It’s me, Chrissie.’ The lanterns moved closer, and she could see men with ropes, calling out to her as they descended.

  ‘Don’t move. For God’s sake don’t move, child. She’s here, by God. Thank the Lord. She’s alive.’

  So here she was on the cliff with the cragsmen, tied against Father’s chest, and sorry for it now. The men above held him steady with ropes as he climbed back up the great ladder of cliff ledges. She lay against his chest, in her body the sensation of how he carried her home down the hills to their village, floating in his arms through the indistinct early light past the circular wall of the graveyard with its many unnamed little stones of babies sleeping deep among the grass and the nettles from the long years of the island losing their children to the ten-day lockjaw.

  He tipped her into her mother’s arms that held on so tight. They forgot to scold her as they bundled her into the box bed in the cottage and piled all the blankets on and round her. She had to promise. Never again. Never do that again.

  For Chrissie was that rare thing on the island, a baby that had lived. She was, Mother said, a Reverend Fiddes baby. Old Fiddes, the missionary who had lived in the manse in the years before Chrissie was born, had grown weary of the grief of burying so many babies, each ten days old, their little jaws clamped shut, their bodies arching and rigid until their crying stopped and they went quiet for ever. The mothers could not bear to name a child until they saw they would live. Oh, those mothers knew how to weep. It was the will of God, they repeated back to the minister as they always had. But he’d doubted it. He’d left the island to go back to Glasgow, put on an apron to train as a midwife.

  Three times he had to go back there before he learned how to solve the plague of lockjaw that came down on the babes in their second week, and all the while more little souls flew up like birds into the air. He came back with a nurse. She had a tin of antiseptic powder to sprinkle over the cut cord, and carbolic soap and hot water to make sure that everything that touched the baby was innocent of germs.

  The villagers had resented such intrusion on their privacy. The nurse had a hard time stopping the knee woman from anointing the baby cord with a rub of oil stinking from the fulmar’s stomach as she always had done, but the proof was in the loud cries of living children and finally they listened.

  Christina’s mother had lost eleven of her own brothers and sisters, all of them sleeping now within the little planticrue walls of the churchyard, bulbs without flowers, a whole host of unknown family members that had left the village population too small and lonely in the middle of the sea.

  But Christina’s forehead was live and warm under her mother’s hand, and her mother breathed in the earthy smell of curdled milk and sheep wool oil that was Christina.

  Christina looked up at her mother’s wet face. She wanted to tell her that she didn’t need to be afraid. For she knew now, she has felt how He bided close with her, comforting her through the dark night. She put her hand into her mother’s rough palm. Chrissie, being small, did not have enough words to comfort her mother, only this hand to tell her that someone loved her closely.

  For even a small child can know a very great thing.

  *

  The story is finished. My mother is looking into the evening with its greenish sky and black trees, somewhere far away from me.

  ‘Well, that’s enough for today and long ago.’ She squeezes my hand but my fist is clenched. She can see in my face what I’m thinking, what I don’t dare to say. I wanted more, stories of him.

  ‘Bide patiently, Rachel. You must be patient.’

  She goes in and fills the kettle, puts it on the range and turns on the wireless that uncle Callum sent us from Glasgow. He works in the shipyards there, turning out ships for the navy. We drink our tea and listen to the big-band music from London, waiting for the news to come on. At last. She turns up the volume. Hundreds of fishermen and pleasure boats have sailed all the way across the Channel to the beaches of Dunkirk. They are bringing back the thousands of our soldiers trapped there at the edge of the sea.

  ‘Thank God,’ says my mother. ‘Those boys are coming home.’

  It’s a few days before my mother picks up her story again. We’re washing the supper dishes, her hands in the water as she looks out at the hills with their dark green forests. I’m drying a plate with a teacloth and it takes me a moment to realize she’s back on the island again.

  ‘It’s hard to explain if you never lived on the island, how cut off we were in winter. How very much we longed for a boat to come by,’ she begins. ‘We could smell it in the night if a boat came into the bay, that’s how much we waited, especially that year of the great storms. I must have been about eight, I think. We were so glad when the winds let up at last and a fishing trawler from Aberdeen finally came to shelter in the bay. The men were straight down to the shore to launch our little boat, rowing out to her. How were they to know what would come of it?’

  CHAPTER 5

  Chrissie

  ST KILDA, 1913

  The wind was raw as we watched the men row out at a fast pace to the Aberdeen drifter. It wasn’t just that we were short of provisions after such a long spell with no visiting boats during the long storms that winter, the men were hungry for news. There was always a fear that the world might have changed during our months of isolation – a new war started, the government overthrown. The islanders had prayed for the health of Queen Victoria long after she was dead and buried. A brass band came to announce the new king but it had not made up for us being in such a foolish position for so long.

  The women wailed that morning as we watched our small village boat bump against the side of the ship, the unsteady swell whipped up by the raw wind. We knew what the men would be shouting up to the crew. ‘What’s the news?’ And then Finlay with his second great priority, ‘And have you tobacco?’ The men were already reaching for the ladder down the ship’s side.

  The face peering back over the rail had been grey, reddened nostrils, a hoarse voice, they told us later. ‘You don’t want to come on board,’ the sailor called back. ‘Everyone’s got a terrible cold.’

  But after such a long winter, they didn’t hesitate. We watched them in the bitter chill, catching hold of the ladder firmly, balancing each other out as they stood and climbed up from the rocking boat. After all, a boat cold was nothing new on St Kilda. It would pass through the village and we would shake it off. The men stayed on ship a while, no doubt sharing a hot toddy. They came back cheerful, with gifts from the captain of a little tobacco and tea and potatoes, sacks of coal, enough at least to last us until the next boat came by in a few days’ time.

  But that night the storms got up once again, the island swept even further out into great black waves, howling winds that stole the breath even as you drew it in. Father started coughing, and then Callum and me. Finally, Mother too. She collapsed in the kitchen and Father had to carry her to their bed. An influenza more severe than any we’d known travelled into each bothy along the village street. And in the gales no boats came by with their welcome supplies of fresh bread or milk – things an invalid could stomach, perhaps. Nothing left for us to eat but the bitterness of salted fulmars and no one left to prepare it.

  Then people started dying, three old ones and a child. Four coffins needed and only a half-recovered Malcolm MacKinnon to try and saw the planks, soak them and bend the ends round to fit an old lady’s shoulders. The shivering nurse and two of the feverish men forced themselves to the top of Conachair to li
ght a bonfire and signal for help, but it was lost in the darkness of clouds and sea spray.

  When the storms dropped and a boat finally sailed in to the bay there was only silence, not a soul moving. ‘Surely,’ the captain told us later, ‘I thought you had all been evacuated someplace else, or died in your beds.’

  Such an outcry in the newspapers: that the last savages in Great Britain had been left to starve and suffer. Mr Selfridge, he from the big London shop, along with the man who owned the Daily Mail newspaper, they got up a charity collection and sent an entire ship of supplies – the publicity from it didn’t harm their sales, no doubt. And along with it came newsmen hungry for a story, wanting to film us islanders being grateful and scenic as sacks of meal and tins of butter were loaded off the ship. And grateful we were, though my mother and the women covered their faces and turned to the wall to hide the shame of being such a spectacle.

  Mr Selfridge had also sent a radio mast so that the islanders might keep in touch with the modern world. It broke down as soon as the minister had learned to use it. So weren’t we just as cut off again all the following winter, the government and Mr Selfridge arguing over who should pay for repairs?

  ‘All we needed was a regular mail boat from the mainland,’ grumbled Father. ‘Why can they not route the lighthouse ship past us every once in the while? Too expensive, they say. Same story if we want to cast our votes. Must we be the only people in the British Isles, along with the insane and the criminals, who may not vote? In this day and age. And they call themselves modern.’

  Usually it was the laird’s steward who came out to collect the rents, but that year the laird himself came on the first trip of the tourist steamer, the Hebrides. He made it clear with his curt way that he was very put out by all this fuss in the papers. Starved indeed. Didn’t we have sheep enough to kill if needed? Seed potatoes to eat? Hadn’t he overlooked half our rents for years?

  There was always such excitement, such combing down of hair and putting on of Sunday clothes when the Hebrides came in with the first tourists, the village women with knitted socks dangling from their arms and apron pockets as they waited by the jetty, the boys with boxes of white and brown-spattered guillemot eggs, the men shouldering bolts of tweed ready to roll out a length to be admired and even purchased.