The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  According to Lloyd’s, Roberts tells me, ‘only 14 per cent of the world’s collisions happen in poor visibility. With poor visibility, people reckon the crew are on the bridge, on edge, concentrating totally. When it’s perfect visibility, people tend to concentrate less.’ When something does go wrong, the coastguard will not necessarily be the first to know since many skippers remain reluctant to issue Mayday calls even in extremis. This is partly due to the obscurities of salvage law, but it is also driven by a misplaced sense of self-sufficiency. According to Roberts, ‘the reluctance is there because of the embarrassment. The fishermen are the worst—when you get a fishing vessel saying “Dover Coastguard, this is a fishing vessel, I’ve got a bit of a problem’”, Roberts smiles, ‘ . . . then you know you’re just picking splinters out of the water. Maybe it’s a macho thing or maybe it’s just the sense that they can look after themselves, but they won’t issue a Mayday call until it’s almost too late. Yachts will do it. Imagine they’ve got a westerly Force 6, they’ve been sailing for twenty-four hours, three people on board, one of them is seasick, and that person is dehydrated, freezing cold—would spend thousands to get off that boat, would charter a helicopter if he could. He’s here in the Channel and he calls Dover and says, “I’ve got a crew member who’s very sick and I’m not sure my engine’s working.” You could be really hard, you could say, “Well, that’s your problem,” but you know what he’s really saying is, “I’m in the cack, I need help.” They’re not actually sinking, they’re still seaworthy, but they’re in trouble and if you left them alone the trouble could get worse.’

  Just as alarming—though in a different way—are the increasing numbers of asylum seekers found in these waters. Most are coming over from the Continent, looking for a new life in Britain. ‘We picked up maybe a dozen last year, trying to get over in those little inflatables that you buy from a garage forecourt. We’ve had others that have been picked up over here by a ferry going back to Calais. We’ve had one jump off the SeaCat ferry last year when he was arrested. By the time the lifeboat picked him up twenty minutes later, he was dead, drowned. It’s just awful. I don’t know what drives them. I don’t know—they’re there, and there are hundreds a day coming.’

  Most incongruous of all are the Channel swimmers. ‘We have 70-odd of them a year,’ says Roberts, ‘and they’re swimming the busiest thoroughfare for shipping in the world.’ He then goes over to a table and points to a chart: ‘That’s the deep-water route for ships with a draught of more than 23 metres. Navigating the Channel is not an easy feat if you take all the variables into account—fog, sandbanks, density of traffic, poor visibility, speed and the kinetic energy of a ship. I sailed on a 400,000-ton tanker once, with another 100,000 tonnes of cargo. The width of a ship like that is the length of a football pitch—they’re huge, huge beasts, and they’re coming up the deep water route all the time. Something that size is probably doing around 17 mph and if they had to stop in an emergency, it would take about seven miles to come to a complete halt. It can’t stop, and it can’t alter course—it can’t come out of this deep-water channel because of its draught. And then you have a Channel swimmer in front of it. The swimmers start off from here [on the English coast] and because of the currents and the tides, they’ll follow a curve. It’s no good that swimmer waving his passport and saying, “Stop! I’m British!” The tanker is coming up here, and it’s going to keep going.’ He laughs. ‘Makes you realise how sane you are, doesn’t it?’

  Reeling off a list of hazards stretching the length of the Channel from Kent to Cornwall, Roberts sounds much like someone reciting mythical trials set for legendary sailors. If, as he says, you can pass the ship-swallowing Sands, then you must dodge Dungeness’s creeping coastline. If shoals and shifting beaches don’t bring you down, then you’ll need to watch out for the white cliffs from which people fling themselves. If you can get past them, you might make it to the mid-Channel maelstrom. Out in the deep water you then have to pick your way through the Lilliputian figures on lilos floating below your bows. If you miss the swimmers, then you must take care to avoid the vast steel leviathans bearing down at 25 knots, seeing nothing and stopping for no-one. If the giants don’t crush you, then you must try to make it past Dorset’s Charybdis at Portland Bill. Finally, if you can make it safely through all of these, you must face a final challenge, Cornwall’s three great slaughterers: the Bishop, the Wolf and the Western Rocks. Even then, you must always keep in mind that those are just the visible hazards, and that both above and far below, packs of silent submarine predators might be hunting: ‘Warships don’t have to follow any rules—they don’t have to call into the Coastguard. The SAS exercise off here to prepare for terrorist attacks, and no warship has to notify us. The supply ships are also considered military vessels, so they don’t have to notify us either—they do, but if they’re on manoeuvres, they don’t want anyone to know. Subs are a case in point—it could be part of the test; can they get through the Dover Strait without being detected? Basically, we don’t know what the military are doing, we just get phonecalls telling us that there are Apache helicopters buzzing around all over the place.’

  To illustrate the number of potential Coastguard headaches, Roberts plays me a video: ‘We use this for training,’ he says, ‘just to give people a flavour of what it’s like out there.’ The tape snows for a while and then goes dark. A faint pixellated outline appears at the top and bottom of the screen, identifiable as the coastlines of Britain and France. Between the coastline are other lights moving apparently at random between the two solid lines. The tape is a fast-forwarded recording of radar signals from all shipping moving through the narrowest point of the English Channel during six hours on an average autumn mid-afternoon in 2001. Each light represents a single vessel, but at this level of magnification the radar cannot discriminate between the light of a 100,000-ton oil tanker on its way to a refinery in Mexico from a 38-foot yacht on its way to a beach in Spain. Speeded up, the lights move like fireflies across the screen, each on its own indistinct mission. At first the movement of the lights seems to follow no coherent pattern, but gradually order begins to appear. The lights moving east-west are closest to the English side of the Channel and the lights moving west-east take the French side. Directly crossing the two horizontal streams are another set of lights, this time moving vertically up and down the screen north-south from England to France and from France to England. Though the separate coastlines appear distinct, the Goodwin Sands do not. They register only as an absence, a space between Ramsgate and the main shipping channels. An inexpert or inattentive captain could miss their existence without even thinking. To complicate matters further, each individual light is moving at different speed, some streaking across the screen, some dawdling at walking pace. To continue Bob Peacock’s analogy of the Channel as the ocean’s motorway, it is as if someone had pasted the M6 over the top of the M4, removed all divisions between lanes, and left each driver to fight things out between themselves. Except for a few basic maritime courtesies, there is nothing at all to stop any of these ships—from the largest to the smallest—colliding.

  Looking at the little pinpoints floating silently across the screen, I think of the old wreckers’ tale of false lights. The radar’s orderly anarchy has become their twenty-first-century equivalent, high-tech lanterns suggesting a cohesion which does not exist. Roberts switches off the video. ‘My God,’ I say, ‘that’s frightening.’ Roberts nods. ‘Cruise ships now can take 4,000 to 5,000 people on board. You’ve got tankers carrying 400.000 tons of Mexican crude. And it’s all coming through this Channel, perhaps in thick fog, or bad weather, or with a Channel swimmer in the middle . . . If you think of all the variables, there’s a recipe for disaster. Lloyd’s reckons that once every five years, a roll-on, roll-off ferry operating out of a UK port will be involved in an incident that will involve a mass evacuation of that vessel. There’s 40,000 ferry sailings a year out of UK ports and 50 million people carried per year. And if we
had a major collision, with that amount of people sailing, it would make Lockerbie look minor.’ And now, as he points out, there’s the potential threat of a seaborne terrorist attack to add to the equation.

  Looking out of the window at the distant froth around the Goodwins, it occurs to me that it is no wonder Britain remained uninvaded for so many centuries. What with the wreckers, the salvors and the suicides, who would ever want to cross this wretched stretch of water? And who, frankly, would want to associate with a bunch of natives who consider swimming with supertankers a valid way of having fun? I say goodbye to Roberts and walk back down the Deal seafront, thinking again of that radar screen with its little criss-crossing dots. But it was not the presence of those tiny electronic insects which seemed most alarming. It was the absence inside them, that tiny oval patch of blackness on the right-hand side of the screen. No lights, no warning sign, no borderline; just a void. Something you would not even notice until you heard the soft scrape of sand against the hull and the sound of the tide going out. Something moving against the side of your final safe haven, something gurgling like the sound of a throat. Just a rush of water and a trickle of sand. And then . . . Nothing.

  Pentland Firth

  THREE

  Pentland Firth

  From where I am standing, it all looks perfectly clear. There’s the mainland behind us with the cluttered harbour at Gills Bay vanishing back into the land, there’s Dunnet Head on one side and John o’Groats on the other. Away over on the cliffs to the far right is the lighthouse at Duncansby Head, fenced about by railings to stop the long-departed keepers from being lifted bodily off the cliffs by the winds which hurtle round this corner of the north. Off on the starboard side is an iron beacon shaped like an old-fashioned birdcage, standing guard over the white water to the west. From sea level, it is just about possible to see from here to the folded slopes of Hoy and the entrance to Scapa Flow. Smoke is visible from a couple of the houses on Orkney, and though the clouds above our heads race along way over the speed limit, there is a warm and springy glow to the whole scene. True, there seems to be a certain amount of disturbance in the water out in the Firth, but nothing particularly troubling. Maybe a few odd little flashes of white by the Pentland Skerries—white where white definitely should not be—and a few unexpectedly large waves flinging themselves against the mainland. And there do seem to be several large rocks, visible even from this level, stuck smack in the middle of a shipping lane. Plus a couple of prominent marker buoys standing sentry over some unspecified hazard. But nothing exactly savage; nothing to really justify this stretch of water’s accursed reputation. Looking out over the Pentland Firth, it occurs to me that there is something seductive about the ways in which the sea deceives. There is not enough here on a bright day in June to show the truth about this place; that this stretch of water, in darkness, in fog or in winter, is murderous.

  On the boat, the wind picks at the supermarket bags. Today’s travellers include two engineers from the Northern Lighthouse Board, on their way over to a fortnight’s work at the island lighthouse, Margaret Gibson, a sparky woman in her seventies who was born here, myself, and James Simpson, skipper and Laird of Stroma. Not that ‘laird’, with its ripe and tweedy implications, seems the right word for Simpson. He’s a tall man, slightly stooped, with his spine curving protectively over his belly. Today—and, you suspect, every day—he is dressed in a flea-bitten pullover the colour of mould, a checked shirt and olive coveralls. He is old, but it is not his age you notice so much as the way he stands in the wheelhouse with one hand on the tiller, one eye out for the land and one ear tuned to the conversation. He has the solidity and assurance of someone who is a part of this place. He looks like the kind of person who would not need to shout to command.

  Above us, clouds rip across the sky, accelerating towards the mainland. Ahead of us, the island creeps closer. Once the bags of goods are unloaded, Simpson, Margaret and I take a stately ride on an ATV to the lighthouse. The island of Stroma is not large—two miles long by one mile wide—but it is singular. Like many of the outposts in Scotland’s archipelago, it is treeless, and, to an eye accustomed to benign lowland curves, comparatively bleak. There could be no secrecy here, no hiding place. From the top of the island it is possible to pick out every tuft of grass from Thurso to Kirkwall and every passing boat from the North Sea to the Atlantic. No-one could do the weekly wash here without half the Highlands knowing the colour of their smalls. In this landscape, with its ripping winds and flinging rain, you would expect the houses to be hunkered down into the ground, buried deep in whatever clefts and dells could be found. But they’re not; they parade down the main road in a line of strict horizontals and verticals, upstanding against the sea and the land. As on the Caithness mainland, the walls of each croft are all built of thin slivers of oatmeal granite bricked up into a form of stone Morse code—dot dot dash, dash dash dot. Many of the doors gape open, showing black against the stone. The window of one croft has a small, perfectly round bullet-hole through one remaining pane. The skeletal hull of a boat leans against the grass, a few old bits of farm machinery rust away in the middle of an abandoned vegetable patch, and the bones of a long-dead whale stand propped against the side of a garden wall.

  As we ride by, Simpson points out the different crofts—some large and relatively opulent, some no more than miniature butt-and-bens. ‘There would be about fifty houses or crofts,’ he explains, ‘small crofts, but they were reckoned to be better off than the fisherman in, say, Wick or Keiss. They set the croft down before they went off on the herring fishing—the herring was a big industry in that days. When the men went to the herring fishing, they had the croft ploughed; the women fed the sheep and the cattle and milked the cow, and when they came home from the fishing they had tatties for the winter feed and then they cut their harvest. When the herring fishing was finished, it was harvest time—it was a seasonal fishing, and it suited the Stroma men perfectly because their wives attended to the crofts. You could say the women in Stroma were liberated well before women’s lib. They’d got men’s work to do—milk cows, make butter; they were very industrious women. And then when the husband comes home they’d have a fat pig to kill—that was your winter meat, all salted.’

  Occasionally, the island would be cut off by bad weather for a few weeks during winter. People got by on the stores they’d gathered in the summer, though occasionally there were more serious absences. Throughout its history, Scotland has been victim to as many famines as Ireland, but since the country was not so single-mindedly dependent on the potato, and was ‘helped’ in times of need by both the Kirk and the lairds, those famines were rarely as destructive as elsewhere. Was it a hard life? Simpson considers. ‘The only thing I would think would be a difficulty is if you were a smoker and you ran short of fags. That was terrible. I was a smoker and on Stroma I was short of tobacco. I tried smoking tea—you get the smell when you came in the house—and then I had sugar beet that we used to feed the animals with, and I steeped the sugar beet in water, and dried it on the stove. And, you know, it was not a bad smoke.’

  On the way past Stroma Mains, the largest farm on the island, Simpson starts quoting: ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they be placed alone in the midst of the earth! . . . Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning that they follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!’ What does he mean? ‘Isaiah,’ he says. ‘That’s what happened. They took the land on either side, and look at the luck it brought them.’ The majority of crofts on the island would have worked between two and six acres of land. The Mains was amalgamated from several smaller crofts and the old cemetery, extending first to 130 acres and then to 230, a Highland Clearance in miniature. But it, like every other house on this island, is now abandoned. No-one, not even Simpson himself, lives here.

  Stroma was inhabited until 1962. In 1914 there were 300 people on the island; by 1957 the population had s
unk back to forty-five. First the shop went, then the nurse, then the school. Even the belated construction of a harbour in 1956 did not stop the slow seepage of people. There is still some argument about the reasons for the depopulation. Some say it was the introduction of the eleven-plus exam, a move which forced the island’s children to cross from Stroma’s school to the mainland ones, and thus to gain a taste for life on a bigger island. Some say it was local council’s failure to take account of local conditions and its refusal to provide regular transport for the islanders and their livestock. Some say it was the lack of a decent harbour. Behind all these reasons lies the blinding geographical one: proximity to the mainland proved Stroma’s blessing, but also its downfall.

  In 1947 the whole island was bought by a Yorkshire umbrella manufacturer named John Hoyland, who fell victim to the old Scottish curse on absentee landlords. Every single one of his tenants left, and as they went, they demanded compensation for the various improvements each had made to their crofts. Unsurprisingly, Hoyland then tried to sell the island. Equally unsurprisingly, no-one wanted it. Rumours bloomed and faded; for one wildly implausible moment, Stroma was going to be home to a nudist colony. Then, when there were no more than sixteen people still living on the island, Hoyland offered the island as a prize on an American quiz show. Finally, in 1960, it was bought by James Simpson: born on Stroma, brought up there; the first islander to pass his driving test, and the last ever to use its roads.

  Later, back in the warm kitchen of his farmhouse on the mainland, Simpson considers the wisdom of his offer. ‘I had no intention of buying Stroma, but I had time on my hands, and I was in seeing the accountant. He sent me up to this lawyer—never met him before, and I said, “I see Stroma was sold last week, and it’s not sold this week. Is it on the market?” “Yes,” he said, “Stroma’s for sale.” I said, “What kind of money?” So he told me what kind of money, and there and then, the lawyer wrote that I, James Simpson, offered to buy the island of Stroma at a certain figure, and I signed my name at the end of it. I went off on holiday, and when I got back there was a letter saying my offer was accepted. Lena [Simpson’s wife] nearly flew at me for being so stupid. She says, “Stroma? What on earth are you going to do with an island?” Next day a letter came in saying would I withdraw the offer because a better one had come in. So that made me all the more determined. I was hard put to pay the money, though.’