Island of Dreams

by Dan Boothby

  Pete Baggeley was a natural tour guide. He was also the treasurer of the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust, Secretary of the Skye Terrier Association, a member of the Pteridological Society (ferns), sat on the boards of several ‘Important Organizations’ (Pete’s words, not mine) and was the Secretary of the Kyleakin Community Council. Pete was the archetypal interfering Incomer. He and his wife had moved up to Skye five years before from Hertfordshire, where he’d worked as an engineer until he’d retired. He knew that his generosity of spirit was often abused by the Natives but carried on giving anyway, because for Pete nothing was worse than having nothing to do. He was Sandy’s opposite in this respect. Sandy had all the time in the world, Pete had almost none.

  After he’d led a tour he’d come and find me wherever I was on the island and he’d find fault with whatever it was I was doing. He’d pour scorn on the Trust or the government, or run down a Local he’d decided was a waste of space, and then he’d tell me the News:

  ‘There’s been a terrorist attack on the London Underground. Seven hundred injured and thirty-eight dead at the last count. Four bombs: King’s Cross, Edgware Road, Liverpool Street and a double-decker bus in Tavistock Road. It’s terrible!’

  ‘They’ve discovered a new planet circling the sun beyond Pluto. Incredible!’

  ‘The police have shot dead an innocent Brazilian man on the Tube in London. They had him down as a suicide bomber. Idiots!’

  ‘Kyleakin Bonfire Night has been cancelled because of new health-and-safety regulations. We just can’t afford the safety measures they’re demanding. There goes another tradition!’

  ‘I heard you were blotto in the King’s Arms the other evening. Drunkard!’

  ‘Who’s that young woman I’ve seen you knocking about with? Dark horse!’

  ‘Come and visit us.’

  Maxwell returned to Britain from Morocco in the early summer of 1967, coughing up blood. He had picked up an intestinal malady in North Africa, and exploratory tests showed a clot on a lung. While he’d been away, negotiations to send Edal and Teko to Aberdeen Zoo had fallen through, as had another plan to send them to Woburn Abbey Safari Park. But a visit to Sandaig by the American film director Jack Couffer set in train the making of the 1969 movie of Ring of Bright Water, which would star Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna. Meanwhile, Richard Frere had found a buyer for the Ornsay lighthouse cottage, and 17-year-old Andrew Scot had been employed to look after the otters down at Sandaig.

  By the winter of 1967 money was coming in from various sources and Frere was able to settle many of the company’s accounts. Andrew Scot was proving to be an able and practical employee and an intelligent companion, and had initiated the release of Teko and Edal from their zoo-like confinement in the enclosures at Sandaig. Richard Frere was a hands-on, competent manager of Gavin Maxwell Enterprises Ltd and Raven Seek Thy Brother, scheduled for publication the following year, would bring in more money. It seemed that things were looking up for Gavin Maxwell. He must have wondered if the curse had finally run its course.

  In the mountains surrounding me the cuckoos sang their lonesome lament. By May, while the daffodils were wilting on the lawn, the rest of the island had turned on the Technicolor. There was the puce of the rhododendrons, the bright yellow of the gorse, the orange and yellow of the ‘bacon-and-eggs’ bird’s-foot trefoil; purpley-blue self-heal, pink dog-rose, violets, pendulous near-scarlet foxgloves, white blossom on the rowans, the delicate yellows of tormentil. Dandelions and white clover were everywhere. The willowy stems of the fireweed grew chest-high and the sea pinks – ‘thrift’ – bloomed on the lichen-covered rocks by the sea. The ash trees were already decked out in green and the reed beds were full of flowers. Variegated, multi-hued caterpillars looped and butterflies danced, whitethroats flashed as they flew at each other and sparred above the brambles by the bothy; greenfinches and dunnocks and chaffinches flickered as they fought for territory and mates. Whirling, diving, hovering, squabbling gulls descended on floating islets of dense weed to peck at the baby moon jellyfish and larvae and tiny crabs that sheltered within. At night in the dark, with the sea warm enough for phosphorescence, I watched porpoises and dolphins switchback and dart like sparkling torpedoes.

  Before the coming of the bridge, a narrow channel ran between Kyleakin Lighthouse Island and a nearby, much smaller, island. The bridge-builders filled in this channel and the two islands are now one, but the engineers also laid three dwarf-diameter concrete pipes so that the island’s otters could continue to follow the path of the old channel between the loch and the open sea. These concrete pipes beneath the approach road, these otter underpasses, are much used, not only by otters but also by sneaky fishermen sheltering from the rain, the odd cat, and a warden called Dan. And it is on the open-sea side of the island – the north-west – where, if you are very quiet, and if the wind is blowing from the right direction, and if you sit very still and wait forever, you will most often see otters. There are freshwater pools on the north-west side. It is quiet and hidden from the road by thick gorse bushes and a stone wall; there are few paths on the wilder side of the island away from the house. The otters have slides and rolling places and holts here; areas of flattened grass and well-trodden otter paths lead into secret places under the bracken and heather, and on little bluffs looking out to sea you will come across crunched-up crab carapaces and langoustine claws, and spraint.

  One sunshine and sunglasses day, clambering round the shoreline, I came to one of the otter underpasses and saw fresh spraint on a rock at its entrance. I knelt and examined it. Urine around the spraint was still dribbling down from the rock. It was very fresh spraint. I stood up, and spotted a splodge on a nearby boulder. I hopped over to inspect it. A paw print. There was a dark, wet slash too – the mark of an otter’s tail – near the splodge. I looked for more paw prints and found one, then another, and another. I must be only a minute or two behind an oblivious otter. I couldn’t believe my luck. I scanned the rocks ahead of me. A little whiplike tail, held high, was moving away from me among the rocks. The whip disappeared, reappeared. I set off, hopping as quietly as I could, and carefully, from boulder to slippery boulder.

  I stopped, wobbled, looked up and an otter was looking straight back at me.

  ‘Peep!’

  The face disappeared. I hopped to where the otter had been. Paw prints disappeared down the steep filigreed shoreline into the sea. I settled myself into the rocks and scanned my binoculars back and forth across the sea. Gulls circled and seals lounged on the beaches like fat slugs. Out on the brown-and-bone skerries piebald oystercatchers skittered and stopped, skittered and stopped. Otters are the commandos, the SAS, of the animal world, and the one I sought had vanished.

  Afflicted as I was by a preposterous nostalgia for a way of life I’d never known, rather than stroll over the bridge to visit the shops or friends in the villages, I’d go by boat. The lighthouse keepers and Maxwell and Richard Frere and all the others had to go by boat when my almost-isle had been a proper island, and so would I. But to do so involved far more than a mere short jog down to the slip, a gazelle-like leap into my dinghy and away. Oh ho-ho!

  1. I had to collect the oars and the lifejacket from the bothy and convey these down to the slip (stuffing the lifejacket into a safe place among the rocks if it happened to be blustery).

  2. A trip back up the slipway, past the cottage, up the steps to the bothy, check that the fuel tank on the Seagull was full,7 lug the Seagull (an all-metal outboard, not one of the lightweight plastic-cased jobs – heavy) onto my shoulder, grab the can of spare fuel (just in case), lock the bothy door, trundle down the steps, trip past the cottage and down to the slip. Lay all this gear down.

  3. Pull the dinghy up against the slip from its mooring out in Lighthouse Bay and tie the painter off on one of the slipway mooring rings.

  4. (a) Juggle the oars, lifejacket and fuel can into the boat and clamber aboard. (b) Haul in the Seagull. (c) Fit the clamp of the Seagull onto the
transom and tighten the wing nuts (very important).

  5. Climb back out of the boat onto the slip and untie the painter from the mooring ring. Pull the dinghy broadside to the slip and leap aboard like a professional boat-handler pirate.8

  6. Release the aft mooring line from the mooring buoy in the bay, fit the oars . . .

  7. (a) Then go boating, or (b) tie up the boat again, trudge back up to the house/bothy once more to collect whatever it was I’d forgotten, and then go boating.

  Depending on the state of the tide and the direction of the wind, the dinghy could be riding the waves on its mooring far out in the middle of Lighthouse Bay, or aground. Low tide made things a little easier as I could just walk out into the emptied-out bay to sling all the gear in the boat. However, I then had to heave the lead-heavy dinghy around hefty lumps of rock and over ankle-twisting hardcore left over from the bridge-building to reach sea.

  And I felt very vulnerable down there beneath the bridge. Sometimes kids, thirty metres above me, watched me for a while and then, just for fun, lobbed stones. The setup wasn’t ideal, and it made me realize how time-consuming and inconvenient life on the island must have been when it was a proper island. Winters, especially, can’t have been easy.

  After Johnny Ach’s funeral, several boxes of files relating to the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust were cleared from his office and taken to the Bright Water Visitors’ Centre. I asked the trustees if I could go through them. Among the papers was a letter written by Richard Frere to Virginia McKenna – ‘After the house at Sandaig burnt down, Gavin was a shadow of his former self. He put a brave face on it, but he was lost, and he had lost almost everything . . . the fire destroyed all that he owned. In some sense, perhaps, the fire also destroyed him’ – and a memorandum that had been sent to Johnny Ach marked ‘Private and Confidential’. Since this didn’t relate to the Trust in any way I decided to mail it back to the person who had sent it – Jimmy Watt.

  Waves were crowding up the loch and pounding onto rocks when I set out in the dinghy for the post office, but I’d been lurking in my room for most of the day and a challenge would do me good and clear my head. I had pulled on waterproofs, loaded up the dinghy and locked up.

  The dinghy rolled around once we were out of the shelter of the slip and the wind pushed us under the bridge and out towards the Inner Sound. I struggled with the starter cord before managing to get it wrapped around the flywheel, fire up the Seagull and set a course east for the pontoons by the Lochalsh Hotel in Kyle. Waves smashed into the bow of the boat and slopped over the sides; spray blew into my face. I slowed the revs and the boat cut a more comfortable path through the choppy, sloppy water. I looked about me. Mine was the only boat moving along the loch. A couple of yachts were moored to the pontoons ahead. A fishing boat was tied to a mooring buoy, its bow dipping into oncoming waves like a nodding donkey.

  The wind coming straight off the Kintail hills was icy and I was quickly feeling its chill. I pushed the throttle forward hard and a ker-lunk! bumped the steady blatter of the Seagull into a high-pitched whine. The dinghy slowed and bounced about in the waves. I cut the engine, wrapped the starter cord around the flywheel and yanked. There was that hysterical whining again, no churning of water, no bubbles or eddies behind the boat. The propeller had sheared off. I cut the engine. It had failed me yet again. The dinghy bounced and swung broadside to oncoming waves. More sea slopped in. Spray from the crests of waves flew into my face and on down the loch. We were in danger of getting flipped. I grabbed the oars and rowed. The wind blew. The waves threatened. I rowed, rowed, rowed towards the pitching, rolling pontoons, rocking on their anchors. Incrementally the warmth and security of the Lochalsh Hotel bar came closer. I focussed and hauled on the oars, keeping the bow of the boat just off the waves, and by the time I got the painter around a cleat in the lee of the pontoons the sweat running down my back was running cold.

  The walk to the post office, where I mailed a very damp letter to Jimmy Watt, warmed me slightly; the Guinness and whisky chasers I downed in the Lochalsh Hotel warmed me more and whether by merry design or drunken chance, my plucky little boat and I practically surfed all the way back home to the island. I had to row like crazy to prevent us being blown under the bridge and out into the boiling cauldron of the Inner Sound, but as ever the drink had a calming influence on us both and saved the day (better to roll with it than fight it). On reflection, though, thinking about it, I could have just walked back.

  The Seagull’s injuries were terminal. According to Sandy, the fact that any engine works at all, ever, is a miracle, because all the constituent parts of a machine are always degrading. All that any human-made ‘thing’ ever wants to do is break itself down and return to its elemental state. As ever, Sandy has a point.

  The island gave up another of its secrets one May afternoon while I was out walking the shoreline looking for otters. It was a day of sunshine and showers – the sun shining strongly to dry the island before another rogue black cloud came to douse it again. I was scrambling up a bank below the lighthouse wall when one of these clouds happened to pass overhead and a light rain began to fall. As I hauled myself up past a smooth patch of rock, letters gradually appeared on it like a message in invisible ink declaring itself. I looked closer at the rock and rubbed rain across it.

  J. CURRIE

  I went to the bothy and pulled the copy of the Lighthouse Keepers’ Register from the filing cabinet.

  ‘Mr John Currie,’ I read, ‘Assistant Keeper, 18 January 1872–8 November 1880. Left Kyleakin for Dunnethead Lighthouse by John o’Groats. Period of service at Kyleakin Light: 7¾ years.’

  I imagined John Currie then, pictured him in my mind’s eye, 120-odd years ago, sitting alone on that sheltered spot down by the lighthouse, hidden by the wall from the Principal keeper’s beady eye. Mr J. Currie has a view out to Raasay and Pabay and the other islands from there, over to the Cuillin Hills and Skye. Perhaps he is watching one of the blazing sunsets, or pondering his future, his love, his life, before carving his name to leave his mark on the island where he’s been living for so long. Seven years and three quarters. Is it a long time?

  After discovering John Currie’s graffiti I often inspected it on my rounds, and it became a talking point on my tours. On very dry days or when it was wet, you couldn’t see anything there at all. It needed a soupçon of water and no more for John Currie to appear. I pointed it out to Marcus and he made a polite noise in the back of his throat and, like John the chairman and Pete, nodded politely before moving the conversation onto other things. But when I showed Mr Currie’s graffiti to Sandy he peered at it for ages. Then he knelt and ripped away some of the moss surrounding it.

  ‘No. Nothing more,’ he said. ‘It’s a shame there’s no date or anything. But that’s magical, Dan, really wonderful. What else have you found?’

  So I showed him the self-winding watch (broken) I’d found on a wall under bracken by one of the paths. And the Daily Record newspaper from Wednesday, 12 June 1953 that I’d fished out from under the bench in the lighthouse shed. And the collection of old-fashioned glass bottles I’d gathered from the seaweed and slime on the beaches on the lowest of low spring tides. I showed him the old medicine bottles and pieces of pottery, the lighthouse keepers’ cap-badge all green with verdigris, which I’d pulled from the sea; and the brass twelve-sided thrupenny bit (1966; still in use when Gavin Maxwell was living on the island) I’d found in Teko’s shed. I told him about the pair of ancient leather hiking boots and the Welsh love spoon I’d found; about the rusting poles and rotting netting on the site of the wildlife park aviary behind the cottage. I took him to the ash tree by the Sensory Garden and pointed out the glass bottle tied to a branch (a wind chime? a house for wasps?). We crept around the shoreline and I pointed out the otters’ holts and crouches and rolling sites, their slides and laying-up places. We examined the low stone foundations of a building that had once stood at the bottom of the lawn in front of the house (a privy?) and the
old jetty (where cinders from decades of lighthouse keepers’ fires still showed beneath the turf), and a fork, engraved with the Northern Lighthouse Board’s initials, melded to a rock in East Bay. I showed him the enigmatic white lines painted on the roof of a little cave near the otter underpasses, and the white crosses painted one above the other on a rock on the north-west side of the island (leading lines to guide fishing boats around an obstruction in the shallows nearby?). I shared with him the photos I’d found in the bothy filing cabinet, and the drawings and paintings and old letters.

  ‘You’ve explored it all,’ Sandy said.

  ‘I know every inch,’ I said. ‘I’m in love with it.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Sandy said. ‘Good for you.’

  Six

  SECOND SUMMER

  I loved pretty much everything about my job on the island, but there was one aspect of it I didn’t love, and which often I found myself avoiding.

  Imagine you are up on the bridge. From there you can see the network of paths, the lighthouse and the lighthouse shed, the heather-thatch roofs of the hide, the cottage, the bothy, the cobbled path, the slipway, and my little dinghy moored to its buoy in the bay. It all looks rather intriguing. If you were to stand in front of that cottage, you could get a fantastic photograph of the loch and the Kintail hills beyond.

  Wouldn’t it be nice to get a closer look at the lighthouse and examine the great span of the bridge from beneath? And what are those little buildings that look like African huts? What a place to kick back, take in the view, sink a few beers, even smoke a joint maybe. You’ve heard a famous writer used to own the island, and a man in the village told you there are otters. You’ve always wanted to see an otter. There may be someone living in the house, but would they really mind if you just had a quick look around? You wouldn’t be long. And perhaps they’re away anyway. Perhaps the cottage is just another holiday home like so many other cottages around here. So you saunter back down off the bridge and nip over the wall onto the island.