Island of Dreams

by Dan Boothby

  Or imagine you’re a Native who visited the island as a child, who knew the lighthouse keepers and their families, who once fished off the rocks here and explored; imagine how galling it must have been to look on as the lighthouse keepers left and strangers came and erected their ‘Keep Off’ and ‘Private Property’ signs. It is ironic that after the auctioning off of the island was stopped to save it from falling into the hands of yet another ‘my home is my castle so keep off’ outsider, one of the first edicts issued by the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust was that ‘access to the “community resource” must be controlled to safeguard the wildlife and plants on the island’. Today only paying visitors – accompanied by a warden – are permitted on the island. How typical it is of the Highlands and Hebrides that the new ‘owners’ of the island are, in the main, strangers, incomers from that crowded country to the south.

  And so it is not surprising that Natives and Locals feel no inclination to support the Kyleakin Lighthouse Island Trust. They were locked out from the beginning. I could never see where the ‘community resource’ came into it. Kyleakin Lighthouse Island remains, in all but name, a private island.

  As warden I had to deal with the fallout of all this and it was horrible. Anyone prepared to clamber over the otter wall is prepared to brazen it out. Some of the interlopers were shameless – marching about the island, video camera in hand, making themselves comfortable on the bench in front of the house. Cockle-pickers came to fill their sacks at low tide; parties of kayakers used the beaches to picnic and pee. Some climbed onto the island to make a point. A gang of cast fishermen from Skye got angry when I approached them, sick of being told to clear off their ancestral lands by Incomers like me. I routinely came across stubbed-out joints and empty beer cans in all the prettiest spots on the wilder side of the island away from the house.

  Almost nobody meant any harm. Most were merely curious. They had no interest in the history of the island and wanted a quick look-see, not a guided tour. But to confront was part of my job. So I confronted, trembling gently, pretending I was some kind of an authority figure.

  I always hoped the trustees might open the island to all, for free. I wanted crowds on the island exploring and picnicking. I liked the idea of happy screaming inquisitive kids running around, bringing the island alive. Then in my mind’s eye I’d see the detritus that humans leave behind: lazily dropped litter, empty bottles and crushed cans and crisp packets and dog mess; the damage that bored teenagers do; break-ins and thefts. A month before my arrival on the island teenagers had vaulted the wall and had a party in the hide. One of the gang had scrawled on the wall:

  05/05/05

  Duncan Huckle9 wuz ere!!!

  Shagged Kelly Maclean10 all nite!!

  It hadn’t taken too much detective work to hunt down the lad (and lass) responsible for this outrage, but the damage had been done. A trustee screwed locks onto all the windows of the hide and from then on the island was locked down at night.

  During my second summer I was awoken at dawn one Saturday by the sound of footsteps on the gravel outside the house. There were no guests staying in the cottage and none expected, especially at that hour. I heard the handle of the half-windowed door of my room being turned and looked on, wide awake now, as the curtain was slowly pushed aside and the face of a young woman peered in. I sat up on one elbow.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, seeing me. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She had an English, public-school accent. Perhaps she slurred a little.

  I stared at her. Blinked.

  ‘I . . . I couldn’t help it,’ she said. ‘I was curious.’

  There was nothing to say. It was five o’clock in the morning.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Good . . . night.’ The pretty head withdrew, the curtain slowly fell back into place and the door was gently pulled to.

  Now, however pretty you are, however full of post-party joie de vivre, would you wander into someone’s garden, have a poke around, a little sit down and, oh what the heck . . . see if there’s a way into the house for a bit of a nose around? To my mind there’s a bold black division line between curiosity and housebreaking.

  The Trust’s fear that too many visitors would damage the ecology of the island, drive away the otters and scare away the birds seems to me unrealistic. Nature is far more resilient than we think. And otters are all over the West Highlands and in many places take little notice of their human neighbours. Otters brought up a litter of cubs beneath a pair of dilapidated wooden lifeboats that for years lay beside the frenetically busy car park in Kyle. Otters negotiate the ladders of Kyle Quay to get to the fish on trawlers and they are regularly seen on the pontoons in Kyleakin.

  Trusts tend to be conservative bodies and trustees wary of and resistant to change. It will take a fearless set of trustees to abolish the ruling of controlled access, but until the island is opened up, local antipathy towards the island and the Trust is likely to remain.

  A trustee telephoned to say that John Lister-Kaye was coming to the island. He would be arriving with students from his Aigas Field Centre. The group were especially keen to see otters and Lister-Kaye would be bringing with him an object that in Maxwell’s day had sat on the mantelpiece in the Long Room. I asked the trustee if she expected me to magic otters into view. ‘Do what you can,’ she said.

  In the summer of 1969 Maxwell invited Lister-Kaye, then a budding young naturalist, to act as curator and manager of the proposed island wildlife park and help him put together a book on British mammals he’d been commissioned to write. The plan was to make the island a tourist attraction. Maxwell would then be able to collect a mass of material for another book, and the income from the wildlife park would save him from having to write a book a year, as he’d been doing since the publication of Ring of Bright Water. Maxwell, for all his creative ability, is said to have loathed writing. He was getting older, was frequently in poor health and was keen to escape the demands of the desk, his publisher, and his readership.

  By the time Lister-Kaye arrived, Andrew Scot had left Maxwell’s employ and another school-leaver, Donald Mitchell, had taken his place. Lister-Kaye worked on the British Mammals book and took charge of the wildlife-park project, supervising the erection of pens and aviaries and helping Donald Mitchell look after the assortment of animals that Maxwell and his contacts were collecting and installing on the island.

  When Maxwell died only a few months later, in September 1969, the wildlife-park project was abandoned. Lister-Kaye moved to a cottage elsewhere in the Highlands and over the winter wrote a book, The White Island, about his few months working for Maxwell. Afterwards, he stayed on in the Highlands and established one of the first ecotourism ventures – taking visitors on trips up into the hills to identify the flora and fauna they found there. For a time Richard Frere, an experienced mountaineer, had worked for the company. Later, Lister-Kaye married and bought a semi-derelict country house and estate in Inverness-shire, where he established the Aigas Field Centre and ran courses for aspiring naturalists and environmentalists.

  Pete and I stood beneath the rowan tree by the gate. I was looking forward to welcoming a past inhabitant back to the island. Pete had elected to escort the group. From where we stood in the morning sunshine we could look across to Kyleakin Beach. Brightly coloured cagoules were gathered around a tall man with a walking stick. A white minibus was parked in the car park behind them. Pete and I watched the group climb into the minibus and the minibus pass down the Kyleakin road before disappearing behind the trees where the German girl had once pitched her tent. A few minutes later the minibus pulled up beside us and an upright, well-built, balding man climbed down from the passenger seat clutching a thumbstick. He wore a well-tailored country suit. A pair of binoculars was slung around his neck. He smiled confidently at Pete and me as he strolled through the gate, held out a hand and introduced himself. I noticed a signet ring on the little finger of his left hand.

  ‘And my students,’ he said, waving an arm at the cagoule-wearer
s piling out of the minibus, ‘are just desperate to see otters!’

  Once the students had gathered around us I closed the gate and Pete led us all down to the house and into the Long Room, where he spoke about the history of the island and Gavin Maxwell. When Pete had come to the end of his spiel, Lister-Kaye coughed politely and told us he wished to say a few words. We stood in silence on the faded Moroccan rug. Lister-Kaye reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew, with a flourish, a blue spotted handkerchief.

  ‘I remember this room very well,’ he informed us. ‘We spent a lot of time in here – Gavin and I, Jimmy Watt, Donald Mitchell – sitting beside the fire, drinking Gavin’s very good whisky, discussing everything under the sun. Virginia McKenna has done a good job of recreating the ambience of the Long Room, except it was always much more untidy, and smelly. I remember the ghastly stench and the mess on the carpet after Teko had finished marking it as his territory, and the time we had a gannet in here that shat, copiously, everywhere. In fact,’ Lister-Kaye declared, looking down and tapping a brogue on the rug, ‘this carpet has survived remarkably well!

  ‘Gavin smoked like a chimney – up to eighty cigarettes a day, and the whole house reeked of smoke when he was here. There were ashtrays in every room, even beside the lavatory and bathtub. And he wasn’t very domestic – there was always a pile of washing-up waiting for someone to do it. Sadly, Gavin was gravely ill while I was living here and he was away a lot, visiting relatives, and later in hospital in Inverness. Donald and I were mostly here alone with the animals Gavin had obtained; his two whacking great deerhounds, and Teko. But I like to think that I came to know him well, and I will always be grateful to him for what he gave me.’

  Lister-Kaye unravelled the spotted handkerchief he’d been holding and produced a jagged piece of beige rock about the size of a boy’s fist. He held the rock up for us all to see, a cluster of sharp-edged discs, resembling the petals of a flower.

  ‘This is a desert rose. Gavin had a small collection of these that he’d brought back from his trips to North Africa and scattered around the house. They are created by gypsum particles crystallizing beneath the sand of the Sahara Desert. After Gavin died I took this piece to remember him by. I’ve kept it with me these past thirty-six years, but it belongs here, on the mantelpiece, in this wonderful room.’

  Lister-Kaye passed the desert rose to Pete to the sound of applause.

  ‘Now, let’s go and look at otters,’ Lister-Kaye said.

  We followed Pete to the hide. I stood outside in the hot sun while the students gathered in the hide to peer through binoculars at seals basking on the skerries and seabirds flying and floating over the bright blue Inner Sound. Lister-Kaye came out from the cold gloom of the hide and stood beside me. He blotted out the sun. I put my binoculars to my eyes, searching for otters for the students.

  ‘Donald and I used to go out fishing by those skerries,’ Lister-Kaye said.

  I removed the binoculars from my eyes and stepped back a little to stand again in the sun.

  ‘There wasn’t much money so we were always looking for ways to feed the animals for free. We caught a lot of Teko’s food out there – saithe and lythe.’

  ‘What was he like, Gavin?’ I said.

  After a moment, Lister-Kaye said: ‘He was incredibly fatalistic.’

  ‘Perhaps he’d picked it up in North Africa,’ I said, ‘or when he was in Iraq. Muslims believe everything is ordained. Maktoub, they say – “It is written”. They believe our lives have already been mapped out by God, before we’re born, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’

  Lister-Kaye narrowed his eyes. ‘Gavin would say to me, “It’s all going too well, John, too well. It can’t last!’’ ’

  I said, ‘Eighty cigarettes a day works out to be around one cigarette every ten minutes. Is it really possible to smoke that many in a day?’

  There was a silence. I put my binoculars to my eyes again.

  ‘You see, there just wasn’t the medical knowledge or the technology available in the late sixties. By the time the specialists found the shadows on Gavin’s lungs it was far too late. He was a brave man in many ways. But a fatalist.’

  I lowered my bins and was about to say something or other but Lister-Kaye had put his to his eyes and was looking out to sea. Lowering them, he caught sight of a butterfly blundering by and called to a student who had come to stand near us, ‘A painted lady, Giles. Vanessa cardui. They migrate en masse from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Quite a rarity, this far north.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Giles. ‘What about otters, though?’

  Pete’s snort came from the cool gloom of the hide. ‘Otters’re around,’ he was telling the students inside, ‘but I rarely see them on a tour. I often see them in the evenings down by the river. Everybody thinks they’re rare but they’re everywhere up here.’

  No otters were seen that day, and after Lister-Kaye and his students left, and after Pete had driven back over the bridge trailing a cloud of oily smoke behind him, I felt unsettled. A ghost had come back to the island, only to leave me wandering alone in a museum again. I locked up and walked down the slip to my dinghy, cast off and went for a long row around the island, then headed further out to the neighbouring islands and skerries, pulling hard on the oars.

  As I passed between the skerries where John Lister-Kaye and Donald Mitchell had once fished, seals lolloped and splashed into the sea from their basking spots and came bobbing round the boat. They eyed me, curious dogs, blowing bubbles. Then they sank without a sound below the surface, leaving only rings in the still, bright water, and these rings expanded and became eclipsed by the greater expanse of the sea, leaving only bubbles, like memories, behind.

  Memories of that second summer return: a male blackbird singing, late afternoon, on the uppermost branch of a dead wind-burnt tree beside the bothy; a hedge sparrow hopping along the path under hanging locks of honeysuckle; a wood mouse, watched from the half-windowed door one quiet afternoon, idling down the path before disappearing under a rose bush, reappearing for an instant, then lifting high its back legs and wading gamely into the jungly grass behind the house; a party of knots, curlews and ten purple sandpipers dipping their long thin beaks into the mud and seaweed of an exposed shoreline; the sun breaking through a grey sky and a big dog otter with white bib catching crabs in East Bay before swimming out of view towards the underpass; arctic skuas – dark brown and falconesque – swooping into the Inner Sound to mob and harry terns and gulls into giving up whatever prize morsel they’d foraged; bats quartering overhead by the lighthouse in the gloaming.

  Moon jellyfish – full-size now – and the occasional lion’s mane jellyfish washed up on the beaches. The bramble bushes and rushes became spotted with cuckoo spit, and that second summer the paths were edged with wild grasses. Common blue and Scotch argus butterflies floated and fluttered around the wild roses and foxgloves, and all around the island scarlet and green velvet six-spot burnet moths clung in couples in amorous posture. From the open water of the Inner Sound came the creaky-kneed growl of the puffins – those little men with harlequin beaks and sad-eyed mien. Flocks of guillemots and razorbills sped and turned under the bridge and over the island. The common and black-headed and herring gulls busied about in a marauding, raucous mob. The flowers of bell heather turned the surrounding mountainsides the colour of blackcurrant coulis.

  And there were mysteries: at three o’clock in the afternoon, during a tour, a roe deer (the same make as Bambi) comes bounding through the chest-high bracken in front of the hide from the direction of the lighthouse, veers away when it sees us and leaps over the otter wall to canter away down the road to the mainland. Presumably it had jumped the wall to get onto the island, or swam across. But why?

  Walking down to the lighthouse in the last of the daylight. A toad lying in the path. I squat and place the back of my hand on the toad’s skin. It is cold, the toad sluggish. It sits there on the path, looking straight ahead, doing nothing much
. I can’t understand how it came to be there. Before the bridge builders had come with their heavy machinery, blasting and infilling and laying rock armour, there had been patches of bog on the island, now there were almost none. Toads migrate back to the water pools where they were spawned to spawn again in their turn. Had the toad swum across from the mainland? Most unlikely. Crawled along the road, over the bridge and under the gate? Feasible, perhaps. Had a predator – a kestrel, say – dropped the toad from on high while flying over the island? More likely, but would birds of prey take a foul-tasting, poison-skinned toad? I left the toad where it was and continued my slow perambulation around the island. In the morning the toad was gone. I never came across another.

  That second summer voles were everywhere on the island. The previous summer there’d been very few. Voles reproduce so fast that every third year there’s a population explosion and then they get decimated by predators. Boom and bust. I came across the voles all the time on my rounds that summer, leisurely munching blades of grass. As I crept politely by they would look up at me, munching away, with an ‘Ooh, don’t you mind me, young man, you just carry on’ look on their faces.

  Then one morning I got up to find the path between the cottage and the hide littered with the corpses of partially eaten voles. I had my suspicions as to the culprit of this mass slaughter, for I’d caught glimpses of lithe musteline creatures running across the paths, but these sightings were so fleeting I was never sure if it was otter, pine marten or mink I was seeing, or just shadows caused by tired eyes. The morning of the massacre, a guest staying in the cottage told me she had spotted ‘a huge red cat’ on the island the previous evening. If mink and pine marten and roe deer (and toads) were using the bridge to move between the mainland and Skye, and exploring the island en route, why not Scottish wildcats? Or foxes?