by Dan Boothby
I found echoes of the past everywhere. As I cleaned and cleared out and rearranged I came across objects previous occupants had left behind: in a tiny cupboard in the lobby a pair of heavy leather 1930s walking boots; on a ledge above a door my prying fingers found a key that fitted no lock; under a sink a square of black card with a tiny whisky bottle glued to it and the words ‘Break Glass in an Emergency’; a Welsh love spoon and another that had been whittled from the board of a fish box. A scrunched-up piece of paper sticking out from under the washing machine in the kitchen read: Gregory, Can you pick us up a couple of bottles of wine (white) when you’re next in Kyle. Thanks xx. Another piece of paper, fished out from under a desk in the bothy, had a drawing of a yacht and a smiley face: Gone sailing. See you later xx.
In the evenings I sat on Maxwell’s old sofa in the silence and antique smell of the Long Room and read comments left by the work parties in the first visitors’ books: of midge-bitten days spent laying the paths and pulling bracken and erecting safety barriers along cliff edges, of drunken marches back from the pubs, of evenings by fires and singsongs and leaving parties.
One day in August I was up in the bothy helping Susan Browning dump some clutter she’d brought across from the visitors’ centre.
‘Even if you’re not here this winter the bothy gets damp and will need airing and drying out.’
I mumbled something about staying on the island a little while longer if possible.
‘I can’t imagine you’d cope all alone on the island. Not after all those exotic places you’ve been to. The winters up here just go on and on. It can rain for weeks at a time. And there won’t be any tours to take. The Centre will be closed. It can be very isolating, you know.’
‘It would be a perfect time to get on with my book,’ I said. ‘There’s so much more needs doing to get the island looking good again.’
‘Oh, I can’t think about that now,’ Susan Browning said, pushing an armful of old blankets at me and bustling off down to the cottage.
An old friend telephoned to see how I was getting on. ‘You live under a bridge? Just like the troll in “Three Billy Goats Gruff”. How long will you stay?’
‘Forever.’
Three
STAYING ON
Sandy Wood looked like a seafaring Santa Claus who’d delivered the Christmas presents far too early and now had almost a year to potter about looking for something useful to do. He was all pale pink skin and Captain Birdseye beard, and he had one of those bizarre hairstyles that some middle-aged men go in for – bald on top, with the silver-grey hair on the side of his head grown long and pulled back into a ponytail, which he kept in place with a purple rubber band. But most of all, and most importantly, Sandy Wood had time.
I’d spied him on several occasions over the summer, criss-crossing the loch between Kyleakin and Kyle, darting around the deck of a classic wooden yacht in a padded plaid shirt and yellow fisherman’s boots. Once or twice he had come into the visitors’ centre while I was there gossiping with Susan Browning. He’d stroll in out of the rain to use the lavatory, dressed in oily jeans and with a shiny black sou’wester on his head, bringing with him easy pleasantries and a strong smell of bilge – that not-altogether-unpleasant odour of seawater and diesel and dust.
‘That’s Sandy,’ Susan Browning had said the first time. ‘He lives on that,’ and she had pointed through a window to a despondent fishing trawler, indelicately draped with blue plastic sheeting, leaning drunkenly against Fisherman’s Wharf. ‘It’s called Ebb ’n Flow. He’s converting it into a sail-training vessel. Very slowly.’
Rowing my dinghy around the island, using it to collect the flotsam and jetsam that washed ashore, visiting the villages in it rather than walking, I felt I was becoming an islander. But the 1956 Seagull outboard engine the old man had given me refused to run. I’d tried everything. I’d found a website devoted to Seagull engines and fired off questions to the enthusiast who ran it. The man responded promptly and I had learned a lot about Seagulls, but still couldn’t get mine to go. A man like Sandy, I reasoned, a man who really knew boats, surely he’d know what to do.
One evening, after yet more fruitless tinkering – the Seagull laid out in the bothy on a length of old sheet like a body on a shroud – I drank several large glasses to effect some Dutch courage and set off over the bridge.
Unlike the boats and the tides around her, Ebb ’n Flow never moved. Fisherman’s Wharf, lit by yellow streetlights, was piled high with plastic fish boxes, rope, oil drums and lobster and crab pots. It was low tide. Ebb ’n Flow lay far below the level of the wharf. There was a ladder. I clambered down the greasy rungs and climbed over the gunwales of the trawler. The deck of Ebb ’n Flow, under the plastic sheeting, was covered with a mountain of gear: half a canoe, old doors, wheel-less wheelbarrows, a Portaloo cabin, pieces of iron and old engines, a ten-foot-high jumble of timber. I picked my way to the wheelhouse where I was met by a large athletic trailhound. It planted its paws on the deck and studied me. I banged on the wheelhouse window. The dog and I exhaled plumes of smoke into the night air.
One of those furry Russian hats moved across the window and I heard the squeak of hinges and footsteps clattering on loose planking. Sandy, looking like an émigré, appeared behind his dog. I launched into the story of the Seagull. Sandy stood by his dog, weighing me up as I bleated out my tale of frustration and woe. It occurred to me that I wasn’t going to be invited below decks for a drink. The water in the harbour around us was still and slick, black like treacle. My voice, thickened and made immoderate by drink, echoed over the water into the empty village streets.
‘Anyway, I was wondering whether you could take a look at it sometime.’ I nodded at the piles of gear. ‘You look like a handy bloke. You know about boats. You must know about outboards.’
I can’t remember Sandy’s reply, just his adroit handling of a tipsy man and how he coaxed me off his boat with a response that was both encouraging and deeply noncommittal. He told me he would come to the island and I walked home greatly encouraged, but when I got back in my room, I realized he’d never said when.
Some weeks later, the Seagull burst into life. I’m not sure what it was that I did, but whatever it was, it worked. I took long exploratory trips down Loch Alsh and puttered up the coast to Plockton. The Crowlin Isles beckoned, but the six miles of open sea between us always felt a tad too far for my little plastic boat and its antique engine.
One of the trustees owned a smart yellow sailing boat. He invited me to sail with him in a couple of races organized by the Kyle Flotilla – a bunch of local sailors. His yacht was a fast little thing and we did very well. One Saturday morning, when a strong wind was blowing and bad weather forecast, I telephoned to see if a planned race, the last of the season, was still on. It was. But at Kyleakin marina – pontoons and boats alive with competitive men in waterproofs readying their yachts for the race – the trustee stood inscrutable beside his little yellow yacht. We stepped aboard. We hauled the outboard from the bowels of the boat and fixed it in its bracket. The big man fussed with the engine, pressed the starter button. The outboard wouldn’t go. I set about hanking a foresail onto its stay. The weather was drear. Rain came to keep the half-gale company.
Sandy skipped past dressed in an all-in-one waterproof overall, a mad glint in his eye. ‘Cracking day for a sail,’ he called cheerfully. ‘Lively!’
The trustee was huffing with the outboard, which still wouldn’t start. Sandy’s yawl, Emma Gaze, was moored ahead of us. A man possessed, Sandy was rushing about on board, chattering excitedly to his crew, hauling on ropes and shouting out bons mots to the other skippers readying their yachts in the wind and rain. The trustee called me back into the cockpit. The outboard was broken and we wouldn’t be racing that day. Sandy, overhearing, immediately invited us to sail with him.
Emma Gaze was ramshackle – all frayed ropes and mildewed sails, oily bilge water and rusty tools. The whole enterprise was run on thrift – mass
ive fishing buoys used for fenders, a cranky old VHF radio. Sandy used bits of rope and knots where richer skippers would use ‘a piece of kit’. The inside of Emma Gaze was a mess. No comfort down there, nowhere to sit, or lie.
‘I’m doing her up,’ Sandy called when he saw me peering down the companionway. ‘Emma Gaze is living proof you don’t need to be a millionaire to go sailing,’ Sandy said when the trustee commented on the storm-tossed state of everything. ‘I beg and I borrow,’ he raised a finger, ‘but I’ve never stolen a thing in my life.’
Sandy’s crew that day was a man called Pat, the warden of the youth hostel in Kyleakin. Myopia and spectacles in the rain are a problem, and Pat stumbled about the boat like a blind man. Pat wasn’t tall and had been dressed by Sandy in extra-large fluorescent orange oilskins. He was very cold, very wet, and for some reason that day (he didn’t usually) resembled one of the seven dwarfs.
Sandy coaxed Emma Gaze’s inboard engine into life and we throbbed out of the marina and into the Kyle, ready for the starting gun. The rain fell steadily and my outdoor-adventure shop waterproofs quickly became soaked through and useless. Sandy put Pat on the helm. The trustee grimly hung on to jib sheets. We tacked up and down behind the starting line. I pushed a sail up to Sandy through the forward hatch and noticed how huge his hands were – mangled and gnarled like lumps of beaten steak, or those dried hams you see hanging in hypermarkets in France.
The wind swung around to the west and blew harder.
The starting gun was fired and we raced up Loch Alsh to round marker buoys and islands. Emma Gaze was a heavy boat. We fell far behind the others. A staysail blew apart, ripping open from bottom to top like a zip. I clawed forward with Sandy to grapple the wildly flapping sail down on deck. Emma Gaze was heeled so far over I could practically walk up the mast. Sandy and I hollered at each other, blasted by the wind and the spray and rain as we fought the tattered sail; we yelled to make ourselves heard over the insane clattering of halyards, the humming sails, the scream of the wind through the rigging, the sea sluicing down Emma Gaze’s decks. And I found myself laughing, loving the thrill of it all, alive and heroic.
We didn’t finish the race till late afternoon, long after the rest of the flotilla had repaired to sip hot toddies in the bar of the Lochalsh Hotel. When we staggered bedraggled into the bar, just before prize-giving, we were met with an almighty cheer.
We didn’t win a prize.
Visitor numbers to the island and the Centre tailed off as soon as the school summer holidays drew to a close. Towards the end of October the tours came to a complete stop. Susan Browning decided to close the visitors’ centre. It wouldn’t reopen till Easter.
For a week or two I felt restless and unwanted. There was little for me to do. The telephone didn’t ring. The cottage remained unlet. I remained unsummoned and my future remained uncertain. Susan Browning and the trustees hadn’t decided, it seemed, whether I should stay or go. I wandered the island, explored the coastline in my dinghy and cogitated. Without others to bounce ideas off, left alone without occupation or purpose, negatives came cantering into my mind like runaway horses, tethers and chains trailing after.
The hills seemed to wither and shrink a little. Days became shorter, nights colder. Mist crept over the hills and lingered low on the mountainsides, blotting out the high tops and wafting across the island like smoke. On such days an oppressive silence and loneliness clung to the villages and I’d fret about seeing the sun ever again. A sleek, matt-black torpedo – a lone submarine – crept around on manoeuvres under grey mists out in the Inner Sound. Then a westerly breeze would pick up and begin raging, ripping leaves from trees and flattening what was left of summer blooms, churning the already racing sea to an angry grey. Bunches of rowanberries littered the island’s paths.
One moonless night, a banshee screeching outside the house awoke me. A south-westerly was blowing hard. I got out of bed and opened the door of my room and stood naked before the gale. The bleached stalks of long-dead fireweed by Lookout Point bowed to the ground. I pulled on trousers and sea boots and pushed around the back of the house, shivering as I stood listening to the sibilant shrieking through the wire-mesh barriers on the bridge above me. It was the cry of the violently insane, this endless beseeching screaming. South-westerlies were always angry.
An area of sea called the Minch, to the north-west of the island, acts like a funnel, channelling wind and waves down the Inner Sound into Loch Alsh. After a gale, rollers – great undulating lumps of oily green sea – rush under the bridge to crash onto the beach at Kyleakin, grab fist-sized pebbles and drag them down into the deep. These rollers, these echoes of ferocious storms in the North Atlantic beyond the Minch, can continue for days. Then the sea round about settles down and there’s a respite of a few days, when the atmosphere is so washed clean that there’s a crisp clear view for miles. Then another low-pressure system comes in off the Atlantic and the cycle of mizzle and gales starts over again.
The grass had stopped growing. Species of bird that had been common around the island became scarce; others took their place. Robins and greenfinches went. Chaffinches and dunnocks came by. A coal tit skittered in the rosebush vacated by the wren. Guillemots, having spent the summer skimming low over the sea in fast-flying flocks, disappeared. The shags left their summer haunt in the Inner Sound to paddle inshore and explore the more sheltered bays around. The dockens were dying; rosebay willowherb had already shed its cotton wool and withered. The brambles, useful for once, sprouted berries. The briars stopped creeping, the foxglove petals fell, rosehips reddened. The montbretias still flashed their fire, but all over, the colours of summer were faltering, fading, like lights going out one by one.
I set to work reinstating the lighthouse keepers’ lawn in front of the house, working my way down the bank to where the heather and blueberries began. I chopped and raked and wheelbarrowed away. From the hills above Kyleakin I began to hear low, gargling roars, like an elongated cough of a bull. I scanned the hills with binoculars but saw only the muted palette of autumn.
One Saturday, feeling terribly alone, I trekked into the Kintail hills. Up there on the high tops, two hours’ walk in from the nearest road, you become a nothing in a landscape more uncaring than your worst enemy. The weather, the terrain – none of it gives a damn about you or the rest of humanity, though it’s nothing personal. One day the world will shake itself and we humans will come to grief just as the dinosaurs did. But the hills and the wind and the waters will remain, long after we’re gone.
As I tramped up a hill I looked to its summit to see thirty hinds – female red deer – ears pricked with curiosity, staring straight down at me from the skyline. Then I spotted the stag, strutting back and forth beside his ladies, glaring at me, daring me to come closer.
On the way down from the tops I fell back into the drenched hillside to watch two stags on either side of a gorge goading each other. They bellowed, trotted along the hill, roared and trotted back the other way, mirroring. The ravine was wide and deep; there was no way they could get to each other. But they roared anyway, crazed with testosterone, ready to fight, vital.
I went to work on my book and spent several hours of each day up in the bothy, preparing my opus for publication, tidying up paragraphs, sweeping sentences. I was impatient now to get on with my writerly career. I was still, in those days, pursuing the notion of writer as romantic icon. I had simply to write a bestseller, gain a vast global audience (by breaking America of course – just like the Beatles, Oasis, Led Zeppelin . . .) and accrue great wealth and acclaim. Gavin Maxwell had done it; I could do it. (Of course I’d be far shrewder than he, financially. He was always broke.) The life of a writer had always seemed to me to be ideal. You worked alone, had no boss, no set hours. You were free to travel. Pen could be put to paper anywhere in the world. And when at last one tired of fame, and the bohemian whirl of louche literary parties became tiresome one could, like my fellow scribes J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon and B. Tra
ven, retreat from one’s public and become ‘an enigma’.
An organization supporting the arts in the Highlands offered writers a critical-appraisal service for works-in-progress. I sent Hi-Arts the opening chapters of my book. I researched literary agencies, composed covering letters and a synopsis and printed off copies of the first three chapters of my magnum opus, my vade vecum of the road. I stuffed my not-so-little bundles of hope into padded envelopes, rowed across to the post office in Kyle to buy stamps (return postage included), and slotted my dreams into the chipped salty maw of the rusty red pillar box. The decision to row across to Kyle, rather than take my car or walk, was an important part of the process. It fitted with the romance of the thing. It might even persuade those in charge of my destiny, whoever they may be, to pull a few strings.
I was ready. I’d been ready for the onslaught of fame and fortune for years.
One of the trustees knew a stalker who worked a large estate some miles from Kyle of Lochalsh. I mentioned I was keen to go stalking. I was interested in spending a day working the hills, instead of tramping over them as a rambler. The trustee put me in touch and early one grey late-October morning I met Ewan at the gate. He was a few years older than I. Solidly built.
‘Ewan’s family are hill folk,’ the trustee had told me. ‘They go back generations here.’
We made small talk in the Land Rover as we struck out north-west.
‘Gavin Maxwell gave my dad a lift home from the station once,’ Ewan said. ‘He came in for a whisky or two, sat chatting. My dad thought him all right; a good talker.’
We turned off the main road and powered over Beinn Raimh. The clouds were being blown apart and a cold sun was peering through. We took a side road and drove along a single-track road. We came to a lodge with fairytale turrets and Ewan steered the Land Rover into a courtyard. A rangy man with smooth white hair and military bearing stepped from an outbuilding.
