The Kingdom by the Sea

by Paul Theroux

  ***

  Some fantasies prepare us for reality. The sharp steep Cuillins were like mountains from a storybook—they had a dramatic, fairy-tale strangeness. But Cape Wrath was unimaginable. It was one of those places where, I guessed, every traveler felt like a discoverer who was seeing it for the first time. There are not many such places in the world. I felt I had penetrated a fastness of mountains and moors, after two months of searching, and I had found something new. So even this old, overscrutinized kingdom had a secret patch of coast! I was very happy at Cape Wrath. I even liked its ambiguous name. I did not want to leave.

  There were other people in the area: a hard-pressed settlement of sheep farmers and fishermen, and a community of drop-outs making pots and jewelry and quilts at the edge of Balnakeil. There were anglers and campers, too, and every so often a brown plane flew overhead and dropped bombs on one of the Cape Wrath beaches, where the army had a firing range. But the size of the place easily absorbed these people. They were lost in it, and as with all people in a special place, they were secretive and a little suspicious of strangers.

  Only the real natives were friendly. They were the toughest Highlanders and they did not match any Scottish stereotype I knew. They did not even have a recognizably Scottish accent. They were like white crows. They were courteous, hospitable, hard-working, and funny. They epitomized what was best in Scotland, the strong cultural pride that was separate from political nationalism. That took confidence. They were independent, too—"thrawn" was the Lowlands word for their stubborn character. I admired their sense of equality, their disregard for class, and the gentle way they treated their children and animals. They were tolerant and reliable, and none of this was related to the flummery of bagpipes and sporrans and tribalistic blood-and-thunder that Sir Walter Scott had turned into the Highland cult. What I liked most about them was that they were self-sufficient. They were the only people I had seen on the whole coast who were looking after themselves.

  It was a shire full of mountains, with spaces between—some valleys and some moors—and each mountain was separate. To describe the landscape it was necessary to describe each mountain, because each one was unique. But the soil was not very good, the sheep were small, the grass thin, and I never walked very far without finding a corpse—loose wool blowing around bones, and the bared teeth of a skull.

  "Look," a shepherd named Stephen said to me on one of these hillsides.

  A buzzard-sized bird was circling.

  "It's a hooded crow," Stephen said. "They're desperate creatures. In a place like this—no shelter, no one around for miles—they find a lamb and peck its eyes out. It's lost, it can't get to its mother, it gets weak. Then the hooded crows—so patient up there—dive down and peck it to pieces. They're a terrible bird."

  He said that it was the predatory crows, not the weather, that killed the lambs. It was a cold place, but not excessively so. In winter there was little snow, though the winds were strong and the easterlies were usually freezing gales. There were always birds in the wind—crows and hawks and comic squawking oystercatchers with long orange bills and singing larks and long-necked shags and stuttering stonechats.

  It could be an eerie landscape, especially on a wet day, with all the scattered bones gleaming against the dun-colored cliffs and the wind scraping against the heather. It surprised me that I was happy in a place where there were so few trees—there were none at all here. It was not picturesque and it was practically unphotographable. It was stunningly empty. It looked like a corner of another planet, and at times it seemed diabolical. But I liked it for all these reasons. And more important than these, my chief reason for being happy was that I felt safe here. The landscape was like a fierce-looking monster that offered me protection; being in Cape Wrath was like having a pet dragon.

  On one of my walks I met a veterinarian, Doctor Pike, who was making the rounds of the Cape Wrath farms, trying to persuade the farmers to dip their sheep. An ailment called sheep scab had been brought over from Ireland and had endangered some of the flocks.

  Doctor Pike was a fluent Gaelic speaker. He was self-assured and well read, and though he did not boast, he did imply a moral superiority in the Highlander—and in the Scots in general—and he suggested that there was something lamentable and decadent in the English.

  "Take the colonies," he said. "The Scots who went out were very hard-working and idealistic. But for a lot of the English families the colonies were the last resort. They sent the black sheep of the family—the rubbish, the drunkards, the layabouts."

  We were walking around Balnakeil Bay; he was headed for a farmhouse. We passed a shepherd driving a flock of sheep to be shorn.

  Doctor Pike said, "You might take that shepherd to be a fool or a rustic. But most of these shepherds are sensible men. I mean, they read. I go to many of these shepherds' wee cottages and—do you know?—I find lots of books in some of them. They take books with them out on the hillsides."

  We had a good view of the sea—the mouth of the bay was wide. There were no boats out there. I seldom saw boats, at any rate. It was one of the roughest areas on the British coast, and the scarcity of boats added to the feeling of emptiness I felt on shore. It was like the world after a catastrophic bomb.

  Doctor Pike was still talking about shepherds. He said, "There was a man here from Edinburgh. He saw a shepherd in the hills and said how wonderful it was to get so much fresh air and exercise. 'But how does it feel to be so far from the center of things?'

  "The shepherd stared at him and smiled. 'That depends what you mean by the center of things.' You see, he felt that it was just a matter of perspective. Who was this city man to say that the shepherd was not at the center of things?"

  I told Doctor Pike that I had seen nine sheep drown in the incoming tide at the Kyle of Durness. He said it was a pity but it sometimes happened. Although sheep could swim, the horns of a ram made it hard for the creature to keep its head up, and the lambs were too frail to swim very far. But he said that he loved sheep—he loved working with them.

  "They have very keen instincts. They have a wonderful sense for forecasting the weather—they know when a gale is coming. They begin leaving the hills many days before it begins to snow."

  The next day I went with Doctor Pike to Loch Eriboll. It was a sea loch piercing ten miles of Sutherland, and it was deep enough to take the largest ships. In the storms for which this part of Scotland was notorious, ships found a quiet anchorage here.

  "I want you to see something," Doctor Pike said.

  We rounded a bend, turning south toward Laid, along the shore of the hugh loch.

  "Look at this hillside," he said.

  It was a rough, steep slope, covered with small white boulders. Patches of the slope had been plowed, but most of it was covered with glacial rubble and humps, and the grass was blackish and sparse. Some sheep stood on it and looked at us with their characteristic expression of indifference and curiosity. This grazing land was very bad.

  "Now look over there, across the loch," he said.

  It was like a different country, a different climate. It was not bouldery—it was soft and green. There were grassy meadows and gentle slopes over there. It was sheltered by the mountains behind it, and pleasant streams ran through it. There were trees over there! There were no houses; there were no sheep.

  But this windswept side of the loch—the western shore, on which we stood—was lined with tiny whitewashed cottages. They were surrounded by broken walls and fences and some bushes. And there were gnarled trees, none higher than the cottage eaves. The roofs fitted the cottages in an irregular way, like lopsided caps, and made the cottages pathetic.

  "These people once lived over there, on the good side of the loch. They were cleared off that land and moved here. They were crofters then—they're crofters still. They were given the worst land."

  He was talking about the clearances, the evictions by the chiefs and landlords who wanted to cash in on the land. It had taken years, but th
e Highlands were eventually emptied—that is, the fertile parts. Enormous sheep farms replaced some crofts, and others were turned into playgrounds—grouse moors and baronial estates. This was also a major reason for the tremendous number of Scottish emigrants, dispersed across the world between 1780 and 1860. So what had seemed to me no more than an early chapter in a history of Scotland, or a melodramatic painting by Landseer, was a lingering injustice. The cruelty of the clearances was still remembered, because many people who had been made poor still remained where they had been dumped.

  "Is it any wonder that some of them are poachers?" Doctor Pike said.

  He was fairly passionate on the subject. He said the land ought to be nationalized and divided into smaller units. The land could be made productive—people would have jobs.

  I said he was the first left-wing veterinarian I had ever met. He denied that he was left wing. He said most radicals were devils. Then he said, "Want to meet one of the victims of the clearances?"

  We stopped at a small white cottage near the edge of the loch and were greeted by an old man. This was Davey McKenzie. He wore a tweed hat and a threadbare jacket and loose trousers. His shoes were cracked and broken. He had a healthy face and good color, and he was sinewy. He was about seventy or a bit more. He raised some sheep and he grew vegetables and he was always followed by a black terrier with a pleading face that lay down and snored whenever Mr. McKenzie sat down.

  "We can't stay," Doctor Pike said.

  "You'll have a cup of tea," Mr. McKenzie replied. He had the same Norse whirr in his accent that I had been hearing for days.

  We entered the cottage and were introduced to Jessie Stewart, Mr. McKenzie's sister. She was perhaps a year or two younger than he, but she was pale and rather feeble. Doctor Pike whispered to me that she had recently had an operation, and he added, "She's far from well."

  "Sit down in front of the fire," she said. "I'll put the tea on."

  It was the end of June—a few days from July—and yet a fire burned in the cottage hearth, and the wind made the rosebushes scratch at the window.

  Doctor Pike said, "Don't trouble yourself, Mrs. Stewart."

  "It's no trouble," she said. "And don't call me Mrs. Stewart. No one calls me that. I'm Jessie."

  The cottage was comfortable but austere—a few potted plants, pictures of children and grandchildren, a calendar from Thurso and some Scottish souvenirs, a glass paperweight showing Arthur's Seat, and a little doll in a tartan kilt.

  Doctor Pike said his piece about sheep scab and then turned to me. "You know you're in the Highlands when people make you welcome like this. No one is sent away. If you come to the door of a Highlander, he lets you in."

  "That's very true," Davey McKenzie said softly.

  "I know a rune about that in Gaelic," Doctor Pike said. "Translated, it goes like this:

  'I saw a stranger yestreen.

  I put food in the eating place,

  Drink in the drinking place,

  Music in the listening place—

  And the lark in its song sang!

  'Often, often, often, often,

  Comes the Christ in the stranger's guise.'"

  "That's very beautiful," Davey said.

  "Some people come," Jessie said. "But these days there are vandals about. We never locked our doors before, but now we lock them. People come—they look so strange, some of these hikers and campers, and the women are worse than the men."

  She went for the tea. Doctor Pike said, "I was telling Paul about the crofters here, how they were moved from the other side—from that good land."

  He did not say that it was over a century ago.

  "It was unfair, aye," Davey said. He blinked at me. He had wet, red-rimmed eyes. "There's so much good land lying idle. Aye, it's hard land where we are."

  He was a quiet man. He said no more. It seemed to me terrible that he had spent his whole life trying to feed his family by digging this stony ground, and always in sight of the green fields under Ben Arnaboll across the loch.

  But the bad land had turned many people into wanderers. Jessie Stewart's life was proof of that.

  "So you come from America," she said to me. "I've been to America myself. I spent eighteen years there."

  I asked her where exactly.

  She said, "In Long Island and Virginia. New York City. Bar Harbor, Maine."

  "The best places."

  "I was in service," she said. "The people were wealthy, you see."

  Her employers had moved from house to house, according to the season, and she had moved with them. Perhaps she had been a cook. Her scones were wonderful—she had brought out a whole tray of scones and shortbread and sandwiches with the tea.

  Why had she left America?

  "I got very ill. For a while I couldn't work, and then I started getting doctors' bills. You know how expensive hospitals are in the United States. There's no National Health Service—"

  And she had no insurance; and the family she worked for wouldn't pay; and she needed major surgery.

  "—I could never have afforded it there," she said. "It would have taken all my savings. I came back home here and had my operation on the National Health. I'm feeling a wee bit better now."

  So she had left the poverty trap in the Highlands and emigrated to the United States and become a servant and fallen into the American poverty trap. And now she was dying on the croft where she had been born. Most of the crofters here were old people whose children had moved away.

  I continued to Caithness alone. The farther east I went, the greener it was, the more fertile the land. There were high mountains near the sea. The sheep were fat. They winced from the ditches where they crouched to get out of the wind. I went on to Coldbackie, Bettyhill, and Swordly. They were small cold places. I went to Brawl and Bighouse. The grass was better here. Caithness was a milder, more sheltered place, with sweet-smelling grass. But I liked it much less than Sutherland—its mountains streaming with pale scree, its black valleys of peat, its miles of moorland and bog, its narrow roads and surfy coast, and its caves. Tt was like a world apart, an unknown place in this the best-known country in the world. No sooner had I left it than I wanted to go back.

  20. The 14:40 to Aberdeen

  FROM THURSO I walked ten miles to Dunnet Head ("the most northerly point of mainland Britain"). On this sunny day its cliffs were a rich bronze-orange and the foam on the violent currents of the Pentland Firth was being whipped into peaks by the wind. The rest of the countryside was as flat and tame as the flagstones it had once produced. Only the place names were exciting—not just Buldoo and John O'Groats, but Hunspow and Ham, and Thrumster, Scrabster, Shebster, and Lybster. And who or what were the Hackle-makers of Buckies?

  People had babies in Thurso and round about. That was unusual. It was a noticeable fact that in most places on the coast there were few small children being towed by parents—even on the sands. I saw big idle youths and middle-aged people and the very old. The very old, especially. They lived in the poorer, sorrier places. But Thurso had become prosperous from the offshore oil, and in the three or four towns on the British coast where there were jobs, there were also young families.

  After a day and a night in Thurso I took the branch line down to Helmsdale, on the east coast. The summer brightness of the Scottish evenings made the flat brown moorland shimmer, and even the fissured bogs and sandpits did not seem so bad. We went along, stopping at ruined stations. THIS IS THE AGE OF THE TRAIN, the British Rail posters said, showing a man from a television show who was noted for his work on behalf of the handicapped people and incurables. He had been hired to promote British Rail. This branch line was certainly on its last legs. It was slow and dirty. But I liked it for being derelict and still stubbornly running across the moors. This was a little like being in Turkey.

  The heather was in bloom at Helmsdale, and among the low twisted trees there were thorn bushes and yellow flowers on the gorse. Large boulders stood on the strand here, where the North Sea la
pped the coast, filling the rock pools. The sea was overlooked by small isolated farms and hills coifed with thick ferns. Sheep nosed around old gun emplacements and crumbling pillboxes.

  I had high tea—kippers, a poached egg, and scones with fresh cream—and took a later train south. It was sandy beaches to Brora and beyond. At Brora I saw a sheep-shearer. He was kneeling against a fat sheep and clipping her with hand shears, just beside the railway line. He did not look up. There were smears of sheep grease on his arms. He was clipping the creature gently, and the sheep was not struggling much. It was as if the shearer were giving his big child a haircut.

  It was a long zigzag through Easter Ross to Inverness, where I was planning to head for Aberdeen. I walked through this slow branch-line train. In the guard's van there was a crate with a label saying. Pathological Specimens—Do Not Freeze, and in the next car a girl was writing a letter that began, "Dearest Budgie." There were campers returning from the Orkneys, and cyclists winding up their coastal tour. A Polish couple (the Zmudskys) were gnawing bread rolls—and their laps were spangled with crust crumbs. A man with unforgiving eyes, named Wockerfuss, and his middle-aged-looking child, a boy of ten, sat sharing a book titled Schottland.

  Mr. Zmudsky smiled at a group of six men.

  "Pgitty tgees," Mr. Zmudsky said, nodding at the trees out the window.

  "Yews," one of the men said, and, realizing that Mr. Zmudsky was a foreigner, the man raised his voice, crying, "Yews!"

  At this Mr. Wockerfuss stiffened, seeming to understand but refusing to look.

  The group of men were railway buffs. They were always a sure sign that a branch line was doomed. The railway buffs were attracted to the clapped-out trains, like flies to the carcass of an old nag. They had stopwatches and timetables and maps. They sat by the windows, ticking off the stations as we went by. Ardgay (tick!). Tain (tick!), Invergordon (tick!), Alness (tick!), Muir of Ord (tick!), and then a bewildered little ticker named Neville twitched his big lips crossly and complained, "Hey, what happened to Dingwall?"