Island of Dreams

by Dan Boothby

Natives are the most grounded of the inhabitants of the Highlands, the most ‘normal’ of all. There are, for instance, very few Native ‘artists’. Natives belong.

  2. LOCALS

  Locals have lived in the area for ‘many years’ – sometimes as few as five, perhaps as many as twenty. (After that, a Local, if well integrated, could almost but not quite be classed as a Native.) Locals may be retired, or young couples with children attending local schools, or childless refugees or misfits from the South. Locals will sometimes affect a Highland accent to show that they have been living in the area ‘for ages’. Retired Locals with a pension do not necessarily need to find employment but, with all that free time, have to do something and so occasionally attend the winter talks. They will sit on all sorts of committees and community councils if they can find a way in.

  Because they have lived in the area for quite some time, most Locals will have got their Highland life in order – gardens planned and laid out, some kind of income-source and a small circle of, mainly Local, friends. Locals will mix as often as possible with Natives, but are aware of the wide gulf that separates them and those who have lived up here ‘forever’. They have accepted that Natives are a different breed and they have come to accept their parvenu status in the community.

  The more useful Locals (i.e. those who have a trade, rather than paint stones and call themselves Artists) are sought-after members of the community. A skilled tradesman will have more work than he can handle, take on too much (after all, you can’t afford to turn down a job when you’re self-employed), and end up juggling customers and letting many of them down. Distances between jobs are vast. The round trip between Kyle and Inverness, for example, is about 170 miles. Tradesmen are always in demand in the Highlands. Even the most slapdash, unprincipled and disorganized plumber, electrician, plasterer or joiner will be welcomed with smiles and open arms when he eventually turns up to get on with the job he originally promised to have finished by twelve weeks last Wednesday at the very latest.

  Locals ploughed their way through their first five winters up here years ago and the Highlands have become home.

  3. INCOMERS, WHITE SETTLERS, BLOW-INS

  These three, interchangeable, terms all refer to that rather lonesome and forlorn creature – the recent immigrant. If he (or, of course, she) can find a viable way to make a living, can hack the winters, tread softly and not irritate the neighbours, he may, once he has done his time, become a Local – although unless he is young, never a Native. (Incomers of Lowland Scots extraction, however, being of the blood, will often fast-track to Local status.)

  Incomers are often English and many come from urban areas. A Welsh or Irish Incomer, or a Continental, is as rare a sight as a hoopoe in the Highlands, although there is a smattering of North American and Canadian Incomers who have ‘come home’ to the land of their emigrant forefathers. A disproportionate number of Incomers are middle-aged, unmarried and childless. (I can offer the reader no analysis of this; it remains a mystery to me.) There are also a large number of retired Incomers who have accumulated the wealth to acquire their dream – a pretty property in a superlative location. Here they can live out the years that remain to them, eking out their superannuation payments and/or disability allowance, create a garden and study the flora and fauna around them. Because of the small population of the Highlands, healthcare up here is enviable – hospital waiting lists are short and the elderly and infirm receive a superior service. This reason alone has spurred many an Incomer to head for the Highlands.

  A small number of Incomers are dreamers, but these characters rarely last long and are more Tourist (see below) than Incomer. Incomers include: refugees from ‘normal’ life who move to the Highlands to escape a society down south that moves too fast for them, assorted eccentrics and adventurers, and the wonderful, hardworking Eastern Europeans – who have taken the building and hospitality trades by storm.

  Incomers are (overly) keen to ‘get involved’ with local community projects and are often stunned to find themselves shunned or marginalized by the Natives and Locals (who know what wanting to ‘get involved’ really means). Highland Council jobs are not generally available to Incomers, who tend to figure large in the voluntary sector. Some Incomers move to the Highlands with the idea of establishing a business, but all too often the business proves to be unviable, finances become overstretched and panic and misery ensue. Many Incomers take to gardening and staring out at the rain from their caravan windows. The younger members of this substratum, appreciating the proximity of mountains and sea, take up climbing, sailing and kayaking (activities that Natives, especially, see little point in). Older Incomers attend the talks, lectures and rambles, much as the Locals used to, before they lost interest.

  Incomers are known to announce their imminent arrival by placing an advertisement under the ‘Accommodation Wanted’ section of the local newspaper. An example I have taken from a copy of an April 2006 West Highland Free Press reads:

  Married couple, he a carpenter/aspiring photographer; she a housewife/aspiring writer, wanting to settle in and raise a family in the North West Highlands, Lewis or Harris. Seek secluded cottage/house/static caravan in rural area.

  The names of the couple follow, together with an email address and a phone number – the code of which denotes a location in the south of England.

  Incomers are really only one step up from,

  4. TOURISTS

  Tourists flood the Highlands between late June and early September, but a steady trickle runs through the region at all times of the year now, with spikes at Easter, Christmas and New Year. Tourism is important to the Highlands and a vital source of income for all strata mentioned above. The tourist season brings with it the reopening of hostelries and catering businesses after the long winter recess, and the staging of events such as ceilidhs and folk music ‘sessions’ in pubs and community centres, which are appreciated by all.

  Tourists in camper vans are a cause of a certain amount of ire and grumbling from Highlanders, mainly because the supremely self-sufficient camper vanners don’t bring much to the party. Those with camper vans stock up at supermarkets in Glasgow and Fort William on the way north, and litter the bays and machair with their vehicles and barbecues. Their main spend is with the ferry company, Caledonian MacBrayne, petrol stations and, occasionally, pub landlords.

  Caravanners are viewed with even more suspicion and ire (clogging up roads, slowing everyone down), but due to the hilly nature of the terrain these are fewer in number.

  It is good to see the Tourists arriving after a long winter and equally it is good to see them go away again in the autumn.

  5. SECOND HOME OWNERS

  Second Home Owners and Holiday Cottage Owners seldom intrude on a Highland community as most aren’t seen from one year to the next. A Second Home Owner visits his postcard-pretty possession infrequently and never for long. (Gavin Maxwell, for the first fifteen years or so of his tenancy of Sandaig, belonged to this stratum. Before the arrival of the otters, he used the house as a retreat, never a home.)

  There appears to exist a division between those who have owned a holiday cottage for a generation or two (who are considered and consider themselves a cut above the rest) and those who have bought more recently. As available properties have become scarcer and prices have increased, the Natives have come to resent these wealthy materialists, who buy and renovate yet hardly ever use. Incomers, usually from areas of higher earning potential (i.e. southern England), have also pushed up house prices and are similarly condemned. Equally galling for the Natives and the Locals (and the poor benighted Incomers), many second homes are bought as an investment and business opportunity. A well-appointed holiday cottage in a picturesque setting can be let in the high season to Tourists for up to and sometimes over £1,000 per week. (A third of the houses in the pretty village of Plockton – down the road from Kyle and the setting of the BBC’s Hamish Macbeth television series – are holiday homes.)

  Second Home Ow
ners and the high prices paid for houses by rich Incomers prevent young Natives and the children of Locals from buying a house in the neighbourhood in which they were raised. This is one of the reasons why the majority of Natives and young Locals live in new-builds and council housing. Another factor, though, is that Highlanders are of a more practical mind than most Incomers and Second Home Owners – new-builds tend to be better insulated and less cramped than traditional stone white houses, renovation is expensive and, as I have already pointed out, reliable tradesmen are as scarce as hen’s teeth.

  In March, after a week of dry Siberian wind, I awoke to a stillness that could mean only one thing. We seem to know when it happens. I went to the door of my room and pulled the thick curtain aside.

  Snow, great flakes of it, falling, covering the island in a smooth white blanket. It hushed. I got dressed and went out into it.

  Otter tracks. I followed them along the cobbled path. They came to an abrupt end. I searched about me. There on the top of the wall. The otter had leapt up, run along the top of it and bounded back down onto the path. More tracks led from the slipway to the doors of the cottage before doubling back to the slip, where my dinghy lay half-hidden by snow. The otter had been in the dinghy, rolled around in it – really squirmed – then back out onto the slipway and into the bay. There were bird prints too: a hopped circle, a line leading to a larger hopped circle, another line, another circle; eccentric, dizzying motifs; like an absentminded professor, eyes to the ground, lost in thought, twirling around in the street, bird-brained.

  The snow lay thick for a week and then it was gone. And in its place – spring.

  Clover and vetch appeared under the bridge, and daisies and buttercups along the cobbled path. Violets blushed and carpets of bluebells covered the slope where on Workcrew Wednesdays John had scythed away brambles and bracken. By the end of March the fragrance of honeysuckle wafted around the bothy. Dunnocks came back to hop among the brambles, and the first curly fronds of bracken unfurled like beckoning fingers in rewind.

  In the first week of April I spotted the first ‘woolly bear’ of the year, and a bumblebee. The redwings returned, filling the night sky with a high-pitched tssiiii-ssiiii-ssiiii as flocks flew over the island on their way to Scandinavia. Seals returned to the skerries with their crying, keening pups; Adam-Ant-eyed razorbills returned, squadrons of black guillemots returned to race over the Inner Sound and, further out, puffins chuckled and growled. Greylags, readying themselves to head north to the Arctic, stomped restlessly on the grassy patches above East Bay.

  Gulls – common gulls, herring gulls, black-headed gulls, lesser and greater black-backed gulls – took it in turns to stand on the chimney pots to jeer at each other and to cast a beady eye over me as I pottered about below. Lighting the fire in the Long Room one day I heard squawks coming down the chimney. On going outside to see what all the commotion was about I found a herring gull standing on the pot, gabbling and waggling its rump, warming itself like an old gent standing with his back to the fire.

  Gulls – for all their beauty of plumage, their Jonathan Livingstone Seagull aeronautical prowess – seem a bad-tempered lot, eternally affronted and peevish. I placed scraps of food on Lookout Point every day and as soon as I’d dropped them gulls would arrive from all directions out of a seemingly empty sky. The first to land would plant a webbed foot on the piece of potato or whatever, stretch out its wings, stick its beak in the air and start screeching. ‘Back Off! Get Back! Mine! You! YES, YOU! Get Back! Back, I say! Just get BACK, can’t you!’ before getting so harried and flustered it would lose command of the situation and find its place taken by another, larger gull, who would be similarly tormented by its greed and its competitors until its position would be usurped by another. And so it would go on. Gulls appear to share none of the communal spirit of, say, chickens, though they live longer. I read of one living to forty-nine.

  Along with the grass, the numbers of tourists began to grow. I heard again the grinding of gears of heavily laden camper vans accelerating up and over the bridge above me. The bramble tendrils, like triffids, were on the move again and the bracken and docks were gaining the upper hand. I coped for a while on my own, chopping and pulling, but with spring becoming riotous it was time to call in the Wednesday Workcrew.

  We got on with repairs to the lighthouse keepers’ cottage. After several memos and meetings, the trustees agreed that the repairing of the gable-end wall was a necessity. A local builder, with an accent so gentle there seemed more Irish in it than Scots, came to price the job. He ran a finger along the brickwork and held it up to show me a lump of gunk on the end of it. ‘Old mortar,’ he said. ‘It’s saturated. Most of this wall needs repointing. Take about five days.’

  A few weeks later he returned with his mate, carrying ladders, scaffolding, mallets and cold chisels. It was good to hear voices and laughter again. The weather stayed fine. On 20 April I saw the first swallow, and six days later I heard the first cuckoo. Insects dropped into cups of tea with infuriating regularity.

  I took my dinghy down the loch to see if I couldn’t get her to sail. I couldn’t, and nearly drowned. The Seagull, recalcitrant museum piece that it was, refused to start and a strong katabatic wind got up and blew me down towards an abandoned fish farm whose steel pontoons and cages clanged and banged like tolling bells tolling for me. I really thought I was going to die that day.

  Pete Baggeley invited me to join his team of Incomers, ‘The Skye Terriers’, for the fortnightly Kyleakin Quiz Night. Villagers donated prizes – whisky, unwanted birthday presents, wine, a plaster figurine, beer, a big box of biscuits, a brand new toaster, a carton of duty-free cigarettes.

  Pete was surprisingly competitive and gave us pep talks, and to start with he believed in us. ‘This night,’ he’d whisper as we sat mentally preparing ourselves for the questions, ‘is our night. Now come on, team, think! And let’s win this one.’ Then the chain-smoking quiz-maestro, Malcolm – moonlighting from his day job as local telephone engineer – would pace back and forth across the community centre, puffing away and hollering out questions.

  A team calling itself ‘The Friends of King Malcolm’ always won by a mile; with other Kyleakin Native teams collecting the rest of the prizes. As Malcolm read out the answers, Pete would put a hand, once again, to his brow and let it slide down his anguished face. The categories of Malcolm’s quiz were always the same: Geography, Sport, General Knowledge, Natural History and, most importantly and cunningly, Scottish History. We Incomers never stood a chance, which was just how Malcolm and the Natives liked to play it.

  With the repointing completed, we painted. The buildings hadn’t seen paint in years. Over two weeks of warm dry weather, we bleach-washed and whitewashed the cottage, the bothy and the lighthouse shed.

  I got the Seagull working and asked Sandy to come out in the dinghy to teach me to sail.

  He sprawled in the bottom of the boat looking on and chuckling quietly as I grappled with the rig. There was barely a breath of wind anyway.

  ‘Give up,’ he drawled. ‘Give up! The mast’s no good. That sail’s far too big for the boat. The boom’s set too low. The mainsheet you’ve rigged is all wrong. You’ll never get her to go. You’ve been sold a dud, Dan. Give up!’

  I told him I’d bought the boat from an ex-policeman.

  ‘They’re the worst!’ he said, and hooted all the more.

  We weren’t out for long.

  A few weeks later the Kyle Flotilla races started up again. I abandoned the trustee and his smart yellow sloop and sailed that season with Sandy in Emma Gaze, crewing alongside an ever-changing cast of strays that Sandy picked up in the pubs, cafes, and hostels he frequented around the place. Sandy believed a day’s sailing to be a balm for all ills and the more people he could introduce to the joys of sailing, the better life would be, though whether for himself or the waifs he coerced onto his boat to crew for him I’ve still not quite decided.

  We never won a prize.

&n
bsp; There was a tumbledown, roofless shed on the island that once housed the lighthouse keepers’ hens. In Maxwell’s day, this henhouse had been converted to accommodate the surviving otter, Teko. I used the shed for storing firewood, which I covered with a plastic sheet to keep off the rain. One day Sandy and I were in the shed rooting around for a board to mix cement on to fill some of the cracks in the paving around the cottage. I was scrabbling around, pulling out old timbers, when I noticed a book-sized lump of concrete with lettering on it.

  ‘Look at this,’ I said, passing it to Sandy.

  ‘Just a piece of the old rendering.’

  ‘Yes, but look.’

  I took the lump from Sandy and rubbed away moss and dirt. Sandy peered over my shoulder.

  ‘A. S. . . . 19 . . . 68.’

  ‘Andrew Scot,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Andrew Scot, one of Maxwell’s otter boys.’

  Andrew had saved the manuscript of Raven Seek Thy Brother from the Sandaig fire and had moved to the island with Maxwell in June 1968.

  ‘He was here at the beginning of the wildlife-park project,’ I said. ‘There’s a photograph in the visitors’ centre of him standing in a dinghy off Kyleakin beach throwing an anchor on a line high in the air. You can see the island and cottage in the background. It’s a beautiful photograph.’

  ‘Another of Maxwell’s boys,’ Sandy said.

  I’ve always felt a certain kinship with Andrew Scot. Like me, he had been seduced by Maxwell’s books and fallen in love with the idea of living at Sandaig. He’d written fan mail. After Terry Nutkins and Jimmy Watt left Sandaig, Maxwell needed someone to look after the otters, someone to keep him company. Andrew came late to the story. He moved to Sandaig in 1967. In the typescript of Raven Seek Thy Brother Maxwell calls him by his real name, Andrew Ball. Andrew changed his surname to ‘Scot’ when he moved to Scotland.

  ‘They fell out,’ I told Sandy. ‘An 18-year-old and a dying manic-depressive in his fifties cooped up on the island together. It was bound to happen. They used to fight, really come to blows. He’s someone from the books I’ve never been able to trace.’