Where the World Ends

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Most people die of smallpox, but not all. The people of Hirta seemed to have little resistance to it, but I am not a Kildan, am I? I pulled through with nothing to show for it but a faceful of scars. And I was able to return. You may wonder that I wanted to. But I had to find out, didn’t I? I had to know who had lived and who had died of the smallpox, and whether the dear boys I’d taught their letters had survived their time on the Stac. Not knowing would have killed me, even though the sickness could not.

  Up and down, up and down: the prow of the boat sawed up and down on every wave that broke. The man behind me asked impatiently, “Are you getting off, lassie? There’s more behind ye, waiting.”

  The boat was carrying the first of the settlers sent by the Owner to repopulate the island: debtors, poor folk; those who had quarrelled with family; the surplus sons of crofters, wanting their own patch of land to farm… Some people will go anywhere for the sake of a roof over their heads. So I stepped ashore, stumbling a little up against Quilliam, who was only then convinced, I think, that I was flesh and blood.

  The desolation of the place was terrible, but its beauty remained just as I remembered it. The silence. Passing clouds snagging on the peaks of Conachair and Oiseval. Shearwaters were making their strange subterranean music, and the graveyard was full of primroses and wild iris. No fine houses. No barns full of plenty. A thousand generations could live here, I swear, and the only riches offered them would be poetry, music and birds. Just maybe, the gift of second sight. I asked Quill what would possess him ever to want to leave such a place, and he asked, “What would possess me to stay?”

  “But now you lads are the Lords of the Isles! Who else knows St Kilda like you do? The things you told me! The mysteries! The stories! Without you – what? The Amazon Queen never existed? Nor Fearnach Mor? Nor those Spanish sailors in their poor smashed boat? Nor the Kissing Rock? Because who could ever call them to mind except true Kildans? Without the ones who know these things, all’s dead from today. Hirta is writ all over with stories. But without you ones who didna die, no one will ever know them!” And I remember, I brandished a book at him out of my pocket and accidentally hit him on the cheek with it and felt badly because his skin looked sore, and scarred like mine. Still my mouth ran on… “You are the Keepers of the Old Ways…!”

  That was when – my lord! – he shot me a look as if I’d called him the Devil-in-tweeds.

  “How can I be a Keeper of anything? I couldna keep a stone in a jar!” It was a shout, and the dogs took fright and pulled the string out of his hands and ran off and we were put to chasing them halfway to Ruaival.

  So, God forgive me, I told him, “You canna go. Mr Gilmour won’t have dogs on his boat. It’s a rule with him. I couldna say why, but he’ll no carry a dog from hither to yon. He hates ’em.” I don’t know what possessed me to say such a thing. It had Quill looking at me with those eyes of his and a forward tilt to his body that (I saw later) all the Saved Boys had. It’s the same tilt as the Warrior Stac has, as if it’s breaching out of the sea the better to breathe.

  “But I hav’ta! I promised Davie I’d take care of the dogs!” said Quill. And he started to walk, as if he would walk away from himself if he could. And I walked after, though I had to pick up my skirt hem and run to keep up.

  That is when he began to tell his story. I believe it was the first time he had spoken a word of it, and much of it he never spoke of again. We walked to Mullach Sgar and down the Great Glen to Glen Bay then up the back of Mullach Mor, talking. He started with King Gannet and ended with the recent surprise wedding of his friend Murdo to the girl John. Shamefully I was not eager to hear about weddings: my own sweetheart on the mainland changed his mind about our marriage after what the smallpox did to my looks. Revisiting Kilda was my way of putting matters right within me. I needed reminding there were good people in the world.

  “A wedding’s a wedding,” Quill was saying, “but a good piper is the making of it, and Calum played his father’s pipes, and it was good – if a touch sorrowful for dancing. We have a saying here: After the world ends, only music and love will survive.”

  Apparently there is a thing they say, too, at their weddings, over and above the wedding vows. Quill told me it. In fact, he took tight hold of my hand while he did, as if to impress upon me that Kilda men really do have souls. Apparently, for all they resemble birds, they cannot fly. And why is that? Because of the sheer weight of the souls they have to lug about.

  “You are the breath I draw, you are the wingbeat of my heart that lifts it high. Your hand keeps me from falling. For you was I born and for you will I live, till Death takes me or the world ends.”

  I confessed that it was lovely, though a part of me wondered why he was telling me, fixing me like that with those sad eyes of his and telling me those words.

  You see, the parts of his story concerning me, he had not told – did not tell till after our wedding a good while later. He still drops them into conversation now and then, as a magpie drops brightnesses in front of his mate, watching me out of the corner of his eye to see if I am offended.

  Nothing about Quill can offend me.

  Where was I? Ah yes. On the peak of Conachair, watching Jamie Gilmour’s boat make ready to sail far below.

  “You are staying, so?” he deduced from the fact that I was up here and the boat was down there.

  “Till Mr Gilmour calls here next time, yes… But you were going.”

  “I canna, can I? Not without the dogs.”

  “I lied about the dogs.”

  He looked at me for the longest time, angry at first and then just bewildered as to why I would do such a thing. Clearly no one on this perfect little island is given to telling lies.

  “So are you going away, Quilliam?”

  “Too late now. When Mr Gilmour calls next time maybe… Oh!”

  I believe we remembered both at the same moment.

  “…the baggage!”

  We set off then and there, but with never a chance of reaching the boat before she sailed. The dogs were there ahead of us, but by the time we reached Village Bay, the boat bound for Harris was no more than a white plume on the far ocean. The tides decide these things: you canna say them nay.

  Happily, someone had thrown Quill’s bundle of belongings ashore again. It lay sagging on the rocks, different colours of cloth peeping out through holes in the hessian.

  Not much to show for a life – a bundle of clothes – but some men own less.

  And most of what matters, you canna keep in a sack.

  Anyway, our life is far from over.

  Afterword

  St Kilda is a cluster of islands and sea stacs – the most remote in the British Isles. Hirta is the habitable, main island. All the place-names are confusing, their spelling fiendish, and when the sea says you cannot go there, you cannot go.

  What you have been reading is a true story…and there again, it’s not. Fiction is elastic: it stretches to encircle true facts and then crimps them into shape to create Story. The truth is that a party of eight (not nine) boys and three men went over to Stac an Armin, also known as Warrior Stac, from Hirta and were marooned there for nine months.

  They all lived – almost impossible to believe, but they did. Only the extraordinarily harsh everyday lives they were already living can have equipped them to survive the ordeal.

  Just what they thought and did during that time is lost to history. No one recorded it – only that Hirta was “repopulated” after the epidemic, with new families from elsewhere. When I first heard of the incident, the questions that filled my head were: how did the castaways manage? Whatever did they think had happened back home? What kept them going? What kind of scars did those nine months leave? And yet it is as if no one at the time thought to ask. These were just “fowlers” working for a distant Owner who never visited the remote islands he owned. So long as the bird meat, oil and feathers kept coming, St Kilda was serving its purpose.

  The saddest untruth I save ti
ll last to correct. When the fowling party was finally brought back to Hirta from the stac, they found not a handful of people still living, but just one.

  Two centuries later, in 1930, Hirta was evacuated of its last thirty-six inhabitants at their own request. Many were given jobs (these people from an island without trees) in forestry! The last surviving evacuee, Rachel Gillies, died only recently, aged ninety three.

  Now Hirta sits amid the turbulent seas and wild weather, the most remote of places. It still retains its breath-taking beauty, its gloomy entourage of sea stacs, its ancient, mysterious ruins, roofless houses…and doubtless traces of love caught like sheep’s wool on the stone walling. They say that “After the world ends, only music and love will survive”. But though visitors come and go, there are no residents left there to sing – unless it is the murmuring subterranean puffins, the bleating sheep and the wheeling seabirds overhead.

  GAREFOWL/GREAT AUK

  Nearly a metre tall, clumsy and defenceless on land but agile in the water, great auks once lived in vast colonies on rocky islands. Hunted by man, the last in the world was killed in 1844.

  ATLANTIC PUFFIN

  In flight, these small, pretty auks beat their wings 400 times a minute. They nest in rock crevices or soil burrows and shed their big colourful beaks after the breeding season.

  MANX SHEARWATER

  Manx shearwaters have been known to live for over fifty years. Often nesting underground, they produce an eerie music.

  FULMAR

  Gliding, banking and riding the updraughts in front of seaside cliffs, the fulmar is an elegant and stylish flier. But if threatened, it spits out the oily, smelly contents of its stomach.

  GUILLEMOT

  These black and white birds spend most of their lives at sea. But, on the bird-calendar, they are the first to return to land after winter, sneaking ashore in the pre-dawn dark.

  GANNET

  Gannets can dive at 100kmph into the sea thanks to nostrils in their mouths, a face and chest “padded” with air pockets, and eyes good at judging distances. Their genus name is morus, meaning “stupid”, because they are so easy to kill.

  GUGA

  Gugas are the chicks of gannets. They hatch from big, tough eggs and grow fat and fluffy very fast, then moult. Their meat was once prized as a delicacy.

  GREAT BLACKBACKED GULL

  Aggressive and powerful, “blackbacks” will launch ferocious attacks on other birds, fish, animals and people. They have a suitably villainous deep “laugh”: kaa-ga-ga.

  STORM PETREL

  A kind of fulmar, storm petrels feed at the sea’s surface and their seeming ability to walk on water gave them the nickname “St Peters”. In storms, they will shelter in the lee of ships. Superstitious sailors imagined they were spirits of cruel sea captains or warnings from “Mother Mary” of oncoming storms.

  Glossary

  St KILDA ARCHIPELAGO a cluster of islands and sea stacs north west of Scotland

  A CHIALL MO CHRIDHE my darling

  BAUCHLE awkward lummock of a person; a patched shoe

  BOTHY a small hut, cottage or – here – place to shelter

  CLEIT a squat tower built of rocks, capped off with rock, for the drying of birds

  CROP a pouch in a bird’s gullet where food softens ready to be digested

  ESCARPMENT a long, steep slope

  GUNWALE the rim of an open boat

  OBÀ hush, shh

  KIRK a church, especially Scottish Presbyterian

  LEE a place sheltered from the wind

  LEVIATHAN a sea monster in the Bible, usually assumed to be a whale

  MANSE the house of a Presbyterian church minister

  MEIRLEACH thief

  MERROW a merman

  PLAID a long piece of chequered or tartan cloth worn over the shoulder

  RIGS family strips of arable land where vegetables and crops were grown

  SELKIE a mermaid – seal at sea, woman on land

  STAC a large outcrop of rock rising sheer sided out of the sea

  TINDERBOX a box containing tinder, flint and steel used for lighting fires

  WICKING the threading of a wick through an oily bird to turn it into a candle

  About Geraldine

  GERALDINE McCAUGHREAN is one of today’s most successful and highly regarded children’s authors. She has won the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children’s Book Award three times, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Smarties Bronze Award four times, the prestigious U.S. Printz Award and the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award. She was chosen to write the official sequel to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Peter Pan in Scarlet, which was published to wide critical acclaim.

  Geraldine lives in Berkshire with her husband John and the lingering shades of all those characters she has invented in her books. Her cottage is under year-round siege from wild birds demanding to be fed. The ducks even knock on the door.

  www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk

  My heartfelt thanks

  I am thankful that the world is so tireless in offering up stories to tell. But there is a big gap between the initial idea for a story, and the finished book. I am grateful to Rebecca Hill and Peter Usborne for welcoming the manuscript, Anne Finnis for polishing its face, straightening its kilt and putting it right about a thing or two. Mairi Mackinnon and John Love for their informed input on language and wildlife, and (I hope) for forgiving me my ignorance. John my husband for his second, third and fourth opinion on the book as it progressed through its various stages towards publication.

  I am indebted to the authors of various factual books I relied on for research, especially Tom Steel for his invaluable The Life and Death of St Kilda and Charles Maclean for Island on the Edge of the World and the authors of all the other works of reference I used; also Jane Milloy for the lovely bird illustrations and Ian McNee for the map.

  Thank you to Ailsa Joy who wrote a play – The Last Man on Kilda – and gifted me the research and stories she gathered along the way, including the story of the marooned fowling party. She, Andrew Gourlay and the whole Gourlay family made real for me a place I have never visited. Above all, they brought alive the strange, primitive wonder of St Kilda.

  Finally, my thanks to you for reading it, because without the reader a book is no more than a bunch of pages snagged in the rock crevices and blowing about in the wind.

  Also by Geraldine McCaughrean

  When her mother dies from a snake bite, Comity’s life in the Australian outback changes for ever.

  With her father lost in his grief, Comity makes friends with Fred, the Aboriginal yard boy. But then the evil Quartz Hogg arrives, who delights in playing cruel games. And when he sets his murderous sights on Fred, it’s up to Comity to stop him.

  Read on for a sample chapter…

  One

  The piano arrived too late to stop the sky falling in. If it had come earlier, things might have ended on a sweet note. As it was, everything was jangled, unstrung, struck dumb.

  Pestered by flies, Comity squatted beside the mound of red earth in the corner of the compound, watching ants explore the new upland in their landscape. How huge it must seem to them – how startling that the ground should have suddenly risen up, disturbing their nests, their sacred sites, their ant city.

  “Take your shoes off your feet,” she told them. “The place whereon you’re crawling is holy ground.”

  The ants paid no attention. Four feet below the surface, Comity’s mother lay wrapped in a sheep fleece, safe from dingoes or crows. By tomorrow, though, the ants would have searched her out and made her part of their underworld territory. Comity looked back at Telegraph House. The curtains were drawn. After the funeral, her father had fairly sprinted inside, slamming shut the door on the sunshine, the heat, the flies, the stockmen, the words of sympathy, the appalling truth. Today he had not set foot outside, not even to see the wooden grave marker someone had wedged into the mound:

  Comity, on the other hand, was drawn time
and again to this corner of the yard. She told herself that she was there to pray, because that is what people do at gravesides, isn’t it? But part of her knew she was checking, over and over checking, that she had not dreamed it, that it had all truly happened; the snake, the horror, the sights, the sounds. The Unimaginable.

  The sky blazed. The telegraph poles trooped like silent, stricken mourners, from the southern horizon, up to the station, through the yard and away across the northern wilderness, finding nothing to say. Even the windmill sails stood stock still. Some time soon, Comity knew that grief would overrun her from head to foot, like a colony of ants. For now, she seemed to be shrouded round in a fleecy weariness that made her stupid, vacant, clueless.

  “But what of the piano, Mary?” That was what her father had said. What kind of words are those to say to someone dying? But what of the piano, Mary? What did it mean?

  Skinny little Fred, the yard boy, came up behind her. For once she even heard him coming, because his hands were full of large round stones that rolled and grated against one another. He had painted them with dots of colour, matchstick figures, animals, patterns.