by David Yeadon
“John,” I said as innocently as I could, “do you ever take a sail across to Adam’s islands…to the Shiants?”
He smiled—a slightly sly smile. John is a “canny man” and just as he spotted my attempts to extract a tale or two of his own personal experiences with the supernatural, he also sensed a possible not-so-hidden agenda in this query. But he was graceful in his response.
“Oh aye, once in a wee while. When I’m testing out a boat…and when the Blue Men are quiet…why? Would you like to join me?”
“Well, actually…yes, I—we—would. Adam’s book has made me extremely curious about the place.”
“’S’not surprising—those islands have a real ‘presence.’ They look so close but when you get there and start walking on those five-hundred-feet-high cliffs with all those thousands on thousands of birds, you’re in a different world altogether.”
“Right—that’s what I got from Adam’s descriptions…y’remember that line at the end of his first chapter—I know it by heart: ‘I have never known a place where life is so thick, experience so immediate or the barriers between self and the world so tissue-thin.’”
“Oh, yes,” said John with a broad grin. “I remember that”—he reached for a copy of Sea Room on his bookshelf—“but I think my favorite bit is on the last page: ‘The islands embraced and enveloped me.’ That’s what it feels like when you’re out there.”
“Sounds like the kind of place that one of my favorite travel writers, Paul Theroux, would enjoy. He once wrote something like: ‘The greatest travel always contains within it the seeds of a spiritual quest, or what’s the point?’”
John chuckled. “Oh yes. Indeed.”
There was silence in the cozy room again, until he continued. “Listen, I’d have been more than happy to take y’both out to the Shiants but I don’t have a boat that would do the trip at the moment. Why don’t you ask Adam if he’s planning to be up here anytime soon. He could show you much more than I could. He knows those islands probably better than anyone.”
“Of course!” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that? But he lives way down in the south of England.”
“Yes, that’s true. In fact, I’ve heard he was moving back into the family estate—y’know, Sissinghurst Castle in Kent—since his father, Nigel, died just recently.”
“Oh, really,” I mused, wondering how I could lure a self-declared “English toff” from the leisured luxury of one of England’s most famous stately homes to the barren bastion of his Scottish isles and the sparse facilities of his rat-inhabited shack there by the shore.
“Why don’t y’just call him and see what his plans are?” suggested John. “You’ll never know if y’don’t ask.”
A pause. Followed by a decision.
“Right. I’ll do just that.”
23
A Journey to the Shiants
JOHN MACAULAY’S IDEA WAS BLISSFULLY simple. Give Adam Nicolson a call, explain what Anne and I are doing on Harris, tell him how much we truly admire his book, and ask if he’d like to take us out to the Shiants sometime for a couple of days to share his islands and his island insights with us.
The actuality, however, was far more convoluted.
Adam was the perfect host when we e-mailed him at his beautiful Sissinghurst Castle home in Kent. He expressed his willingness—indeed his enthusiasm—for the prospect of such an adventure but emphasized that first he had a book to complete with very tight deadlines, and second, that his boat, Freyja, was docked way down on the Isle of Mull and out of action for the foreseeable future.
“If you can organize a boat for us I could join you in a couple of months,” he e-mailed.
“No problem. Leave all the details to me,” I confidently e-mailed back, assuming that finding a boat on our island of sailors and fishermen would be as simple as raking up cockles on the Luskentyre sands.
However, looking back through my files and copies of endless e-mails, I found this cryptic communication a while later:
Greetings Adam,
You remember what I was saying in my last e-mail about the accumulating minutiae of our small odyssey?
Well, how’s this for a hopeless lot of non-sailing sailors on Harris—an island once renowned for its stalwart skippers?
In order of frustration:
John MacAulay…with apologies, no boat available (and he being such a famed builder and restorer of boats!)
David “Woody” Wood…Unbelievable rates for two return twelve mile crossings but no boat available anyway until June “at the earliest…it’s in the shop.”
Alison and Andrew Johnson…“Would love to help out but the Shiants are a bit too far for our little craft!”
Shiants Trips Company…company defunct and boat sold.
Hamish Taylor…“A wee bit much for my 6 meter boat and it’s also a very unforgiving place.”
Neil Cunningham…Lost a finger. No sailing for a while…
Donald MacSween…the clam fisherman—no reply after 6 answer-phone messages.
I’m almost at the point of giving up and making the story a kind of hapless Brit-com about never getting there at all…!
All the best, A weary and worried David
Nevertheless, I didn’t give up. It was a long shot but I called good old Angus Campbell, my fisherman friend and skipper of his Interceptor 42 who had taken us out to St. Kilda a while back. The only problem was that his cruiser was docked in West Loch Tarbert and the Shiants are off the east coast of Harris, requiring a departure from the Tarbert ferry dock. If Lord Leverhulme had ever managed to complete his proposed two-hundred-yard-long “canal” linking the two docks (and thus formally making South Harris an island in its own right), there would have been no problem. Angus could have motored through in a couple of minutes. But, as it was, he would now have to sail all the way around the bottom of South Harris, a journey of over thirty miles. And then back again. Twice. I felt guilty even suggesting the venture to him.
“Okay. Fine,” he said.
“What?!”
“Fine. Sounds like fun.”
“Angus, it’s a heck of a long way for you…”
“If you pick up just for the fuel, I’ll promise to bring some of Christina’s banana cake…”
I couldn’t believe our luck and his generosity and heard myself starting to gush thanks.
“Okay. Deal done, David. Give me the dates when you’ve talked to Adam. Bye.”
Angus is not a man to waste words. But he is definitely a man of his word and it was he who turned what was beginning to look like a farcical impossibility into a splendid actuality.
It may seem a little odd, going to all this trouble just to spend a couple of days and nights on two deserted islets, fully visible from the shore, and with few if any diversions beyond the bizarre antics of a small flock of sheep. Indeed, the world-famous author of Whisky Galore and dozens of other books, Compton Mackenzie, who first purchased the islands in 1925 and rebuilt the one shack here, described them as merely “three specks of black pepper in the middle of that uncomfortable stretch of sea called The Minch.”
But I found the multilayered portrait painted by Adam of his little fiefdom too vivid and enticing to ignore. And in fact, on his Web site (www.shiantisles.net) he offers an open invitation to anyone to visit: “You are extremely welcome to stay on…this wild, beautiful and demanding place…one of the great bird-stations of the northern hemisphere, with some 250,000 seabirds, including puffins, guillemots, razorbills, shags and great skuas, arriving there in the summer to breed.” He even goes on to suggest a shopping list of basic supplies for those adventurous enough to accept his invitation.
The birds are obviously the galvanizing attraction on the Shiants. But, as Adam revealed in his Sea Room, the islands resonate too with geological wonders, dramatically untrammeled beauty, and deep echoes of ancient cultures and occupancies.
Adam even turns such “presences” into evocative and slightly eerie prose:
Isl
ands, because of their isolation, are revelatory places where the boundaries are wafer-thin. My sons tell me that night after night, asleep in their tent on the island, they have heard footsteps beside them in the grass. Not the pattering of rats, nor the sheep but something else. And although I have never heard anything like that, I am inclined to believe them. These remote islands are “places of inherent sanctity” and these footsteps are perhaps some of the last modern echoes of an ancient presence.
Later on, during our stay together on the islands, he told me a second short tale that has now become part of the folklore of the two-room cottage. Some visitor here had slept in a bed by the far wall of the second room and had been awoken by persistent knocking on the door. He got out of bed, opened the door, peered outside, and to his great relief saw no one. However, he had been suddenly chilled by a blast of ice-cold air and quickly returned to his bed, only to be awoken later in the night by the sight of a very old and wizened man standing over him. The old man stared at him for a long time, shaking with anger, and then finally said, “You are sleeping on my grave…and that is where you shall remain.” Obviously, the visitor somehow survived in order to tell his alarming tale, but since that time beds have never been placed in that corner again.
Much later, when we were finally together on the Shiants, along with a celebrated photographer-friend of Adam’s, Harry Cory Wright, who had joined us at the last minute, I was intrigued by Adam’s references to the “presences” haunting his own life back in England.
Despite his own remarkable achievements and awards in publishing, his life had been immersed in the Nicolson literary pantheon of his father, Nigel, his grandfather Harold, his grandmother Victoria (“Vita”) Sackville-West, and the whole Bloomsbury cult, revolving largely around Virginia Woolf: “It all became a bit too much—too much history, too many myths and ghosts. I mean tradition has it that the Nicolsons—my lot—are Viking descendants who once owned castles in Stornoway and Sutherland and pretty well ran things up here long before the MacLeods muscled in. And then, much more recently came the whole Bloomsbury-groupie era. My grandmother was invariably cast in the role of Virginia Woolf’s lover but she was a kind of fictional figure to me—I never really knew her. She died when I was four. And even if I had remembered her it’s been so overlain with all the family history and papers and letters and photos and hundreds of books and magazine articles—many misleading, some utterly bizarre—that it feels almost like pure fantasy at times. When I was in my late teens I honestly couldn’t bear anything to do with all the family stories, so I just pursued my own track without any reference to…well, I just couldn’t take any more of the ‘Adam Nicolson, grandson of Vita Sackville-West’ stuff…you’ve just got to have some pride in yourself and who you are personally.”
Adam paused. The onus of the “celebrity-offspring” state had obviously been difficult for him. I wanted to tell him of my fascination with the Bloomsburys, particularly when, as a young urban planner working in London, I’d lived for two years right in Bloomsbury Square, once the social hot spot of the avant-garde literary set. But I didn’t like to disturb his story.
“Anyway,” he continued, “now it’s different. I’ve actually become really quite interested in it all. I don’t feel in the shadows anymore. I’ve had wonderful arguments with my father—Nigel—about writing. We invariably disagreed about style. He said what mattered most was ‘clarity’ and you shouldn’t write anything you couldn’t explain in the same way at a table. My feeling is that writing is much more complicated: it should have its own internal landscape—rich, convoluted…I mean Sea Room is a curious combination of things I know very well layered over with a million things that I didn’t know anything about…and it’s odd. When I read it now I feel it’s drenched in terrible sadness—everything passing—layers of things long gone…”
“Ah—those ‘presences’ again…”
“Yes—those—and other ‘presences’ too. My own family particularly! I felt I had to be honest and get rid of those, otherwise they’d be lurking behind the whole book…”
“Hence your exquisitely memorable, almost throwaway line—‘Most of my family was gay’…”
“Oh God, yes. Got a few reprimands for that…and I had to kind of make fun of myself too by using that cartoon of me in the West Highland Free Press—a very antilairdish paper—showing me sitting like a London toff—more British than croquet hoops—in a bowler hat on a rock ledge being shat upon by guillemots and snarled at by sea monsters!”
“Those presences again. The guilt of the aristocratic landowner—snoblesse oblige!”
“Absolutely!” Adam laughed. “Definitely a problem. When my father bought the islands over sixty years ago for fourteen hundred pounds, he said, ‘To me, buying them was the most exciting thing in the world,’ but the only real interest it generated was the fact he was taking over Compton Mackenzie’s little fiefdom and his cottage, previously owned by Lord Leverhulme until 1925. Nowadays, as I wrote in the book: ‘My presence on the Shiants is about as easy or convincing as a basking shark ordering Sole Veronique in the dining room at the Ritz! Up here the English landowner is an alien, part joke, part irritant. As one angry local once said to me here—“You can no more say that these islands belong to you than I can say that I’m landlord of the moon.” ’
“And he was right—although they’re no longer ‘mine.’ I passed them on recently to my son Tom when we was twenty-one, just as my father did to me. They’re the center of their own universe. They can’t be ‘owned.’ When you think that prior ownerships might have been historically dependent on a succession of acts of violence, quite literally of murder, rape, and expulsion. Y’know—Viking-inspired ‘rites of inheritance’ and not something I want to be part of!”
“But of course,” I said (with a chuckle, not wanting to offend this likeable “toff”), “didn’t you claim in that TV series you did for your book Seamanship—great stuff, by the way, I really enjoyed it—that you have no problems with your magnificent fifteenth-century Sissinghurst Castle with one of the finest formal gardens in England created by Vita and Harold in the 1930s, and your beautiful Perch Hill farm too, which your TV-star wife, Sarah, has made into a masterpiece of rural organic husbandry and commercial acumen.”
“Too true!” Adam chuckled back. “I’m quite content with my farm and my castle, thank you very much! But actually, the National Trust owns a lot of the castle and the farm is a serious and difficult business. We work hard, y’know. We don’t spend our days chasing foxes with hounds and indulging ourselves in decadent country-house parties!”
“No—that definitely seems to be true if the number of books you’ve written is anything to go by. I’m even amazed you had time to join me here!”
“Ah well—your idea was just too enticing to pass on. Plus the fact I love being on the Shiants. Any excuse will do! If you want to get fit—or die—this is the place! I never cease to be amazed by how beautiful and halcyon it all is. So—thanks for organizing everything so well.”
THE “ORGANIZING” HAD BEEN A little more trepidatious than Adam knew. I had become too familiar with the fickle vicissitudes of arranging anything on Harris. Invariably some glitch or unexpected catastrophe would botch my carefully made plans and schemes. The weather was often a prime causal factor of glitchiness, but it could just as easily be the kind of blocks and barriers that initially made finding a boat to the Shiants nigh on impossible. But then, fortunately, along came Angus with his generous offer and everything began to tick and tock along like finely tuned clockwork.
Shiantscape
And there he was. His boat was on time, ready and waiting, my carefully purchased boxes of supplies were lined up neatly on the dock along with four heavy bags of coal (“You’d be amazed how much coal gets used up in that chilly little shack,” Adam had told me), and I was standing there expectantly clutching a rather sad little farewell card from Anne. There had been another family emergency and she’d returned once again to Yo
rkshire. “Take care, and make sure you have a life jacket…and don’t do anything daft!” she’d written, fully aware of one of those minor glitches that had almost led to the cancellation of the entire venture. It could have been worse, but on one of my rambles across the pernicious, heather-clad slopes of the moor above our cottage, I’d managed to lock my ankle in a tight cleft between two invisible rocks and, if the pain was anything to go by, almost tore it off.
“Nothing torn,” the doctor in Tarbert had assured me, “however try not to walk around on it too much for a while…”
“But I’m off to the Shiants for a couple of days with some friends,” I said. “And there’ll be quite a bit of walking and climbing involved.”
“Ah, the Shiants—I’ve always wanted to go out there,” he’d mused. “Well—who’s doing the cooking?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said.
“So—why don’t you let your friends do the walking and whatnot and you stay and look after the meals?”
“That’s not quite what I had in mind.”
“No, I’m sure it’s not, but I’m assuming you’d actually like the use of your ankle back sometime in the foreseeable future.”
“That bad, eh?”
“It will be if you don’t watch it!”
So watch it I did, wrapping the poor bruised and swollen appendage in an elastic bandage and cramming it into a near-bursting boot. And there I stood on the dock as Angus made his final preparations for the voyage, suddenly realizing that time was slipping by and there was still only me at the appointed meeting place.
Surely not another glitch, I thought. The worse one of all. Angus ready, boat ready, supplies ready—but no Adam!
Suddenly a cheerful shout echoed along the harbor—“There you are, you old…”—and I turned to see this tall, long-faced, aristocratic-looking individual, dressed in a navy pea jacket and laughing gleefully between huge teeth, giant-striding along the dock, arms outstretched, face aglow with good fellowship.
