Sea Room

by Adam Nicolson

  Sometimes on an early autumn evening in the Shiants, when the Minch can be as perfect and still as it was on the day of Teignmouth’s visit, I think of that wherry making its slow and beautiful passage to Valamus. The hay is stacked high amidships and the big dun sail boomed out to one side. From a distance, it looks charming, absurd, like a pregnant heifer stepping slowly across the sea towards her byre. On board, the party of men and women and the shepherd’s family are all lying on and around the hay, fiddling with the stubs of the sweet vernal grass between their teeth, joking, chatting, stretching with the exhaustion of their work, while in the stern, Archibald Stewart in his Highland dress, sitting there next to the helmsman, notebook in hand, is calculating future prices – the rent for Pairc and the Shiants that year is three hundred and twenty-six pounds – and all the other costs of dominance.

  The Stewarts gave up their tenancy in 1842. They had moved on to richer pickings on the beautiful west side of south Harris, clearing people out of the township of Scarista, where the rich and flowery grazing of the machair stretches for miles along the Atlantic shore. The people left, either for Cape Breton in Canada or over to the acid exigencies of the Bays on the east side of Harris, where, cramped and hungry, they turned to fishing for the semblance of a livelihood.

  On the Shiants, the new tenant was a grazier from the parish of Hawick in Roxburghshire on the Scottish borders, with the resonant name of Walter Scott, but no relation I think of the novelist. Scott did not bother with hay or any other crop on the islands. He was a sheep man and he would turn the place over to sheep. He left them there to graze unsupervised all year long. With no crops to protect, there was no need of a summer shepherd and for twenty years the Shiants were empty, visited occasionally for the sheep and called on by yachtsmen. In 1859 the antiquarian, TS Muir, looking for signs of early Christianity on the islands, found himself wandering over an abandoned landscape. He identified the church and chapel on Eilean an Tighe but on Garbh Eilean all he saw was ‘a ruined hut here and there on its undulating surface … indicative of a former population – shepherds only, perhaps, as there are no traces of cultivation.’

  15

  ON A CALM DAY, when the swell is not running too high, you can stand at the door of the Shiant house, and in the binoculars see the nearest roofed buildings. There are two of them, one above the other, stepping up the hillside away from a beach of big, white stones. The place, called Molinginish, is twelve miles to the west on the Harris shore. The entire settlement of about eight houses, the others still ruined, now belongs to a Stornoway lawyer, Simon Fraser. There is no road there and he uses it as a weekend and holiday place, walking in from the small village of Rhenigadale a couple of miles away. He is now the Shiants’ nearest neighbour.

  One lovely quiet evening, with the Minch as still as a metal plate, I took Freyja over there, motoring on the outboard and with a pod of dolphins part of the way for company. Simon Fraser had seen me coming, met me in his own boat just out from the shore, tethered Freyja on his mooring and invited me into the huge empty barn of a house, perhaps four times bigger than the house on the Shiants, for a glass of whisky. He is a tall, powerful, successful and confident man, an influential figure in the Western Isles, involved in many dimensions of its political and commercial life. In the half-dark by the fire, surrounded by his handsome sons and their beautiful, silent girlfriends, and walking around the crumbly paths of the settlement, scratching past the thorn trees that have sprouted between them, we talked – it felt a little strange, as if we were men in a club, although I was still in my survival suit from the boat and we were here, so far away from the world – about the others who had lived in our two places before us.

  They were intimately connected. The family of Campbells who lived on the Shiants from 1862 until 1901 originally came from Molinginish and eventually returned there. For four decades, the journey I had just made would have been one of the central threads of the Shiants’ life and it was through those Molinginish Campbells that the Shiants had one last, full and intensely female flowering before they were finally abandoned.

  In 1857, the islands had a new tenant, a man called Mitchell Scobie. It may have been Scobie who wanted to reintroduce a shepherd to the islands. Fishermen had long been in the habit of stealing sheep from the Shiants. The Stewarts had told Teignmouth about it; there are stories from the late nineteenth century of guilty fishermen leaving a few pennies inside the skin of a stolen sheep on the beach between Eilean an Tighe and Garbh Eilean; Malcolm MacSween would later complain to Compton Mackenzie about it; and Hughie MacSween once saw a fishing boat put a dinghy out and head for the shore – ‘I’m sure they were intending to grab something’ – before catching sight of him and rapidly turning tail. Scobie may have wanted simply to protect his stock and reduce his losses. But there might, I think, have been another reason. Donald Campbell of Molinginish and his wife Catherine Morrison may have been desperate to go out to the islands.

  Early in the nineteenth century, the Campbells had been cleared off the township of Telishnish, on the shores of West Loch Tarbert on the Atlantic side of Harris. They drove their flocks overland while others of the family sailed their boats round by the Sound of Harris, and up to this stony place on a harsh shore. It was neither worse nor better than any number of places to which the cleared families moved on the shores of the Minch. ‘They have a terrible sea to fish on,’ James Hogg had said of the Hebrideans, ‘and a terrible shore to land on.’ That is true of Molinginish, where the ebb tide and contrary wind whip up a white mass of disturbed water in the bay and where arable soil is as scarce as on Mars. Here the women and children were sheltered by the shore while the men fished Loch Seaforth for herring.

  The Campbells were a dynamic and fertile family. Donald had six brothers and four sisters. One of those brothers, Blond Norman, had eight children with whom he emigrated to Manitoba; one of the sisters, Little Mary, married a Morrison, had ten children and left for Quebec. The size of the Campbell flocks were famous throughout the island, and they kept goats and cattle too. Any girl marrying into this hotbed of fertility and energy might well have been in danger of submergence.

  In the mid-1850s, Donald was about thirty and Catherine Morrison, from somewhere in Lochs, in her early twenties. They were married in about 1857. Two years later, their first children, Roderick and Marion, were born. They were twins and within a year they were dead.

  In the autumn of 2000, on a long walk through the glens of Pairc, thinking about the Campbells, wondering why they should have come to live on the islands, when the current at the time was running so strongly against remote island life, I met, by chance, a woman whose life had also been dominated by the death of her son, when a baby, several decades before. She was old now, living on a croft from which no other light could be seen. Would I help her? she asked from the doorway as I was walking past. There was a tup in the far field, she said, and he was ‘always after the ladies’. Could I move it into another field where it wouldn’t be bothering them the whole time? She gave me a bucket full of sheep nuts to entice the animal into another enclosure.

  I found the tup looking excitedly over his fence at the ladies, shook the bucket at him and he trotted after me. I then had tea in the scoured and empty kitchen of the croft.

  ‘Where do you stay?’ she said. ‘Coit do’n bein sibh?’, ‘Where do you belong to?’

  ‘In England.’

  ‘Where there is no God,’ she said, with resignation.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I hear it on the radio.’

  Her husband had died. He was a tall man, as tall as me, and he died ten years before. At his peak he weighed eighteen stone, but that went down to twelve before he died. So was she alone now?

  ‘No, I’ve got a daughter. I lost a son when I was eight months pregnant. She’s asleep through there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘You may be sorry,’ she said, ‘but you’re not listening.’

  �
��What do you mean?’ The question opened the door to a monologue filled with the language of the pulpit.

  ‘You’re not listening to God. I knew God for the first time when I was just married. God was speaking to me and I wasn’t listening. I wouldn’t know him. I would not know him. God was saying, “The little man, he’s not yours, he’s mine, and I’m going to take him to me because he doesn’t belong to you.” And everything He was telling me, everything He said, that is what happened. The little man, Norman we called him, he lived just two hours and then he died. And that was right. Everyone needs to learn that God is high and you are low and that’s God’s way of teaching. That is what He did for me.’

  I scarcely knew what to say. ‘That’s a cruel way of doing it,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not cruel. Because that’s what taught me. And still there is a place for him, for Norman, in this house now. If he’d lived, he’d be forty-six now and I wouldn’t have had to send you for that tup.’

  The family had endured a hard life. The husband had worked on the roads and she had done the farm. ‘I was milking two cows for the house. There wasn’t anything else. It was what we needed. He’d be doing the sheep and the lambs.’

  She returned to her subject. ‘You don’t know God,’ she said again. ‘You don’t know that He is high and you are low. And I will tell you this. The little man came back to me, little Norman came back to me, in a white raiment held in front of Him and I am going there to join him. All I must remember is to put nothing below me. Humility. I am low and He is high. That is what I must remember and I will join him there in Heaven. That is what God taught me. He taught me that by taking the little man. How old are you now?’

  ‘Forty-three.’

  ‘Ah well, by the time you’re fifty, you’ll be starting to think about it. Our minds are too small to understand, to know what the air is made of or what water is made of. We don’t know because our minds are too small to comprehend it. And everywhere the Lord – you know what I mean by the Lord? – the Lord is a silent listener at every conversation. You can’t understand that. You can’t understand how the Lord can be everywhere at the same time. Our minds are too small to comprehend it.’

  It is usual for outsiders to ridicule the fundamentalist Presbyterianism of Lewis and Harris and it is sometimes difficult not to laugh, out of surprise and embarrassment, if nothing else. I have attended a sermon in Lewis which began: ‘Some of you here might think you are on this earth to enjoy yourselves. You are not. You are here to suffer …’ Almost the only possible reaction is to shift a little in your seat and smile awkwardly beneath the unequivocal glare of the Almighty.

  That is scarcely enough. This deeply conservative religion, with its sharp delineations between good and evil, its unequivocal sense of the reality of Hell and the goodness of God, whatever hurt and injury the world He created might impose on His followers, emerged as the people of the Hebrides and the Highlands went through the catastrophic social and economic crises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At a time when nearly all worldly sustenance was either stripped from them or was falling away under the influence of huge economic and political forces, the radical ministers of the Church were among the very few who stood by the people. As God’s world killed the children, through famine, poverty or disease, God Himself, mysteriously and unknowably good, remained all-powerful, the only refuge and guarantee against a lost eternity.

  The churches here, in other words, are a bastion against erosion. They are defensive structures, a form of retreat from the modern and an insulation against the wickedness of the new. However much they have argued and divided over the years, the churches hold on to their congregations because they give a kind of nourishment and support which the material world has often failed to provide.

  After speaking to the lonely and troubled widow in her croft, and thinking of Catherine and Donald Campbell at Molinginish after the death of their twins in 1860, I wondered if the Campbells’ move to the Shiants two years later was not also motivated by some desire for a retreat, to the insulation of island life, away from the damage which the world could work and incidentally away from the crowding presence of the other Campbells. The Shiants may have seemed to Catherine Morrison like a refuge.

  For whatever reason, they went to the Shiants and for forty years the family became identified with the islands. Donald was known as Domhnall Mor nan Eilean, ‘Big Donald of the Islands’. He was said to have been ‘a big strong man, hard-working and a thorough gentleman.’ Catherine was the more austere and dominant figure, controlling the lives of her children. Soon enough, and certainly within five or six years of their coming to the Shiants, three of them had been born: John or Iain, who turned into a blond, powerfully built giant, a tremendous worker, who was also deaf and dumb. Hughie MacSween thinks it was John who cut the steps up the rocks from the beach on to Garbh Eilean. He had two sisters, Mòr or Marion, and Catriona or Catherine. And they were to become famous throughout Lewis and Harris.

  The house they were occupying was, I think, not on the site of the present one, but just to the north of it and just south of the old graveyard.

  It was later used by lobstermen from Scalpay and remained roofed at least until 1928 when, at the invitation of Hilda Matheson, Compton Mackenzie gave a slightly woozy-eyed talk about the islands on the BBC:

  You see that diminutive hut thatched with reeds, mind your head, the door is only four feet high. You had better sit down at once, or the smoke will make your eyes smart. It’s rather dark inside because the only light comes from the hole in the thatch which is letting out the smoke. Gradually, however, your eyes get used to the dimness and you find yourself in a dwelling place that has grown as it were out of the island like one of its flowers. It is as genuine a product of environment as Robinson Crusoe’s residence. It makes you a little impatient even of a tent. Every bit of wood used in the construction has been washed ashore on the island beaches – even the planks covered with rushes on which you are going to sleep. You might disdain your quarters at first, but after you’ve climbed all over the islands you will be glad enough to lie down and sleep with the firelight flickering on the sooty thatch, watching the blue cloud of smoke above your head and pearl-grey Hebridean night through the only aperture.

  There, for the first ten years or so of their Shiant life, the Campbells lived. They grew ‘potatoes, barley and oats, cabbages and etc.’ as Calum MacSween told Compton Mackenzie, and cut peats on the heights of Garbh Eilean ‘but as to how he managed to come down from Garbh Eilean to House Island with a bag of peats on his back is a conundrum.’

  Life soon improved. In 1870, the tenancy of Pairc and the Shiants changed again. The new tenant was Patrick Sellar, son of the infamous Patrick Sellar who was tried (and acquitted) for his cruelties in the Sutherland Clearances. This Sellar, who had mainland farms as well, would be pilloried by a string of witnesses from Pairc in front of the Napier Commission in 1883, but at least he did something good for the Campbells. He built them a new house, with two rooms and two garrets, a fireplace in each end and two large windows looking out to the Galtas and Molinginish on the Harris shore. It was in this house and its predecessor nearby that the Campbells sheltered the crew of the Neda when it was wrecked on the south-west tip of Eilean an Tighe in February 1876. All visitors to the Campbells speak of Donald’s charm and courtesy. With generosity and warmth, he and Catherine looked after the shipwrecked sailors, and in particular the child that had been swept into the surf.

  In June 1879, the naturalist John Harvie-Brown came out to the Shiants, hitching a lift on HMS Vigilant, a fisheries protection vessel. Harvie-Brown, thirty-five, enormously rich, charming, bearded, a bachelor, slightly asthmatic and a little fat, profoundly and invigoratingly fascinated by all aspects of the natural world, gives a sudden sight of the Campbells at home. With him was his friend, Matthew Heddle, Professor of Chemistry at St Andrews, the pioneer of mineralogy in Scotland, who was now fifty-one. Donald Campbell was now about fifty-thre
e, Catherine forty-six, their son John nineteen and daughters Mòr and Catriona seventeen and fifteen respectively. On board the Vigilant, the two gentlemen, as Harvie-Brown wrote in his diary:

  reached the bay below the shepherd’s house & landed. None of the Shepherds’ family spoke English except the two daughters who spoke a little. The family consists of two daughters both uncommonly handsome girls. My fancy was the younger & I think sweeter-tempered and merrier of the two – Bella – Profr. Heddles fancy was the tall graceful dark haired black-eyed Spanish looking belle who would have graced any ball room. She certainly is one of the very loveliest women I ever beheld. Then there is a deaf & dumb son who afterwards assisted us and acted as our guide – a fine looking, strong fair haired giant, a little bonny girl – a younger sister – and the father & mother.

  The little girl was in fact Donald’s niece, Mary Campbell, daughter of Donald’s brother Kenneth. She was here, extraordinary as this has always seemed to me, as servant to her uncle and cousins. She was about six years old. There is no need to imagine any sort of Dickensian cruelty but the idea of a maidservant on the Shiants in the 1870s – and she remained with them here until the 1890s – suddenly reorientates any primitivist picture you might have had. These beautiful girls, in a well-run household, in a modern house, with extensive vegetable plots around the bay, a professional father – he was away ‘at the clipping’ on one of Sellar’s mainland farms at the time of Harvie-Brown’s visit – with a capable and consistent concern for the well-being of others: this is not at all like Compton Mackenzie’s peat-smoked vision of naturalness. This was modern civilisation alive and healthy on the Shiants. Life here was better than in the cramped and highly stressed conditions of either Molinginish or Scalpay, where by the 1870s five hundred people, cleared off good land in the north-west of Harris and the island of Pabbay, had been crushed on to an island which before the 1840s had supported two families.