by Anne Cholawo
The kitchen needed to be made a little more user-friendly for both of us. It is difficult to describe, but the kitchen was divided in two by a wooden tongue-and-groove partition that had once been the original wall to the room. The sink, gas cooker and wooden homemade fitted kitchen cupboards were in the other part, half-hidden in semi-darkness. There was no window directly to that room, just light filtering from the front kitchen window and the back hall through a doorway without a door and an open, modern staircase. Even I could see this was not only inconvenient for cooking or using the sink, but it would be impossible to keep warm through the winter. That problem would have to be solved later on.
There was a long wooden trestle table (also ex-army) with matching bench against the wall behind it, a free standing old-fashioned store cupboard with Formica top, and a spindly wooden washstand, the top covered with peeling tartan sticky-back-plastic. I also found a rather chipped, lightweight dressing table in the sitting room that I moved to the kitchen as a spare working surface. The reason, I believe, for these strange arrangements in the kitchen, was that Gilbertsons didn’t manage to complete their alterations before they decided to leave. However, the essentials were there: never undervalue somewhere warm to sit, hot and cold running water or a flushing toilet! Along with cooking facilities and a dry comfortable bed, that’s all you need. Anything else is superfluous luxury.
So many people worry about electricity and the lack of it. Spend a few years without it at all and you realise it is just an added convenience, a luxury rather than one of life’s necessities. That is, of course, if you are content to keep your life very simple. In years to come, I would discover that it was the expense and scarcity of paraffin and the increasing need to use mobile phones as well as computers for communication, which brought electricity into the equation of a workable life on Soay. In 1990 when I arrived, four out of the six permanently occupied properties were without electricity, including the schoolhouse. I had yet to meet them, but the owners of these two houses had generators to power all the modern conveniences of the day: washing machines, fridges and television. The other residents were used to, and seemingly content, being without electricity. I had already either sold, or given away, my electrical appliances, such as they were. All, except for a string of Christmas tree lights. I’d kept the lights for sentimental reasons as they reminded me of my childhood Christmases and I just couldn’t part with them.
On my first day, however, the lack of electricity was the very least of my concerns. To make use of the two-ringed gas cooker, I would first have to connect it to a gas bottle. The gas bottles used to be kept in a wooden box outside by the front door. The gas pipes went through from the outer wall of the house and under the floor of the kitchen, which fed both the cooker and gas-powered fridge. There was already a full bottle of gas in the box, but disconnected. I had no earthly idea how to connect the bottle to the regulator. I stood there completely baffled. At first I thought to go down to the school to ask if someone would connect it up for me. I felt so very stupid. Surely, I thought, surely this can’t be too technical for me to work out? It took over half an hour to realise that the black elongated knob at the side of the gas regulator needed to be turned clockwise to make the regulator slip onto the brass connection at the top of the gas bottle. Then it had to be turned to a 12.30 position to allow gas into the pipe. That did it. I felt very pleased that at least I’d managed to get the gas stove to work and without help. Tonight I would eat and sleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
Waking dream
When I woke next day I was filled with a jumble of emotions: excited, frightened and very anxious. Elated to be finally here on the island, I was anxious about a whole plethora of unknowns, both logistical and financial. I had been far too focussed on just getting to Soay to be honest with myself about the basic pecuniary realities. My financial calculations had been optimistic to say the least and I had not allowed for any margin of error. Luckily I did not have a crystal ball in front of me – I would have seen myself stumbling from one practical problem to another for the next eighteen months to two years. Without help and support from kind people on and off the island, I’m fairly sure I would have failed miserably within the first six months.
But for now, at least, I was blissfully unaware of the full extent of my personal liabilities and I could enjoy the adventure of exploring the island. I seem to remember that May morning was gloriously sunny and I put mundane worries to the back of my mind.
What a pleasure to discover the small but beautiful waterfall in the harbour. With Taffy on a lead, I followed the track meandering past the houses in the south bay, Camus nan Gall, or Bay of Strangers, then up and down a steep hill, through a peaceful wooded glen and on to the harbour on the north side of Soay. The path had been well built, I discovered, by past inhabitants, sometime between 1830 and 1850, and it had stone culverts incorporated within drystone walls to allow for the myriad of burns running down the hillside into the harbour. It became one of my favourite walks – the waterfall is nearly always running and a steady trickle of water flows down the stepped rock even in the most severe drought. But it is at its most spectacular after heavy rain, roaring and gushing as it pours gallons of white foamy water over the cliff top. If the sun happens to be shining, the spray and droplets sparkle and rainbows form wherever you look; it is the kind of waterfall that could have come straight from my childish imaginations. There is no other fall of water on the island to compare with it.
I found that herons nest on that side of the harbour in the densely wooded cliff-side. In spring, they make a prehistoric cacophony of sound; it’s not difficult to imagine pterodactyls sounding like them many millions of years ago. Herons are not at all dissimilar to those ancient flying raptors when you watch them circling above the treetops. I heard the terns calling along with oystercatchers, eider ducks and greylag geese. And there were so many divers – great northern divers and red and black-throated divers. I didn’t know their names back then but I still loved to watch them and hear them, just appreciating their skill and beauty without being able to identify them. Soay had all the elements that made my dream place come true. I felt no uneasiness there; the trees, burns and lochs were all in perfect proportion to the size of the island. To me, the island was neither too small to be claustrophobic, or too large to feel lost and alone. The Cuillins to one side and the small isles dotted about on the other made me feel as if Soay was cupped within a huge hand: the mountains were the palm and the rest of Skye the thumb. The other islands were like fingertips emerging from the sea, keeping Soay safe from the worst of the elements. It was enormously comforting.
At night there was no orange glow. A billion stars winked bright and clear in the ink-black, unsullied dome of the sky. I discovered that part of the Milky Way, flinging out a long arm across the expanse of space, is easily discernible from Soay. With patience, there is always a meteor or two to be seen at almost any time on a cloud-free evening.
However, these romantic thoughts would not be enough to give me a sustainable life on the island. ‘You can’t eat a beautiful view,’ as one Soay inhabitant dryly commented after I had been enthusing extravagantly about the fantastic scenery. It was one thing to walk around dreaming and musing, quite another to address the problems and costs of day-to-day living. To make a successful permanent home and to have a regular income to go with it in a place like Soay meant getting to grips with reality.
For a start, I had to collect my furniture. But how? I had naïvely thought that there was some sort of organised ‘system’ and that all I needed to do was find out what procedure there was for moving things to the island. After a few weeks I realised that there was no ‘system’ or ‘procedure’. Everything had to be manhandled, one piece at a time, from jetty to boat, to dinghy, to shoreline and up the beach by arm power alone. I had neither the funds to charter a boat – nor the arm power – to do it myself. The only other option was to ask my neighbours for help. This was an enormous blow to my
illusory sense of independence.
In the highly urbanised world I had just come from there is an infrastructure so all encompassing that we are completely unaware that it exists. If we need something moved, there is a system to move it; if something is broken there is someone to fix it. If we want to buy a specific item there is a shop that provides it. If we need to get from A to B and we have no transport of our own, we hop on a bus, train or taxi. If all else fails we might hitch a lift. Imagine if a neighbour you hardly know knocked on the door and asked if you would mind driving an eight-mile round trip to pick up their furniture. Or telephoned to tell you they are at the station four miles away and need a lift home with their luggage. Perhaps they’d been shopping and you found yourself climbing a hill with their heavy load. I was painfully aware that I might seem that kind of needy neighbour as far as the other islanders were concerned.
There is an urban myth about islands and islanders. Somehow, it seems, they are a different kind of human being. An ‘all in it together’, cheery bunch that sit around all day enjoying the view, drinking tea, ready to entertain any stranger that passes by. They are (apparently) all of the same mind and aspiration, so it must be one big jolly party and everyone is the best of friends. However, I had enough insight to realise that people who live on islands are as diverse and complicated as the rest of the human race. And they have lives of their own to lead.
Luckily for me, there were enough people on Soay back in 1990 to spread the load. They were all independent and capable and I was the only liability they had to deal with.
Once again I struck lucky. Anne and Gordon volunteered (at least I think they did!) to help me with my furniture by bringing it over with their assault craft. It would take three or four trips, they thought. May 1990 was exceptionally calm and hot, so it was not long before the three of us headed over to Elgol. I drove off to pick up the first load but could only fit the smaller items into my car. The bigger things – my Art Deco sofa bed (from Tottenham Court Road!) – would have to come in Gordon’s blue van. Along with: stripped-pine wardrobe, chest of drawers, pinewood double bed plus six Edwardian hand-carved dining-room chairs, the barley-twist legged, oval two-leafed walnut antique table and Edwardian wooden Ottoman. My precious piano began to ring alarm bells in my head. I was starting to realise that it would be incredibly difficult to get it on to the island. Until now, it had never occurred to me that I might have to part with it.
If you are not used to carrying heavy loads over and over again, it’s not easy lugging boxes, bags and stacks of books up and down an uneven beach and along several metres of rough track. I had overloaded the tea chests and they had to be half-emptied onto the beach. The poly bags, filled with curtains and last minute packing, were too thin and had a habit of splitting before I was halfway to the house. My bedroom chair was teetering on barnacle-covered rocks near the lapping waves waiting its turn to be moved, looking like a surrealist painting. Willing hands helped to lessen the load which speeded things enormously. I was so unfit and slow, fretting in case my two precious seventeenth-century books were getting wet.
It was only after the enormous effort of shifting the big furniture, and particularly my over-heavy sofa bed, that I finally saw the obvious. To expect my new neighbours to carry my well-beloved piano over to Soay, up the stony beach, along the narrow track and into the house was simply out of the question.
Heavy items had obviously been shifted to Soay before. How else did the generators, Rayburns and Agas get there? But such items were more essential to everyday living. Besides, I was no concert pianist; I was self-taught and used the piano for rest and relaxation only. I realised I would probably have to sell the piano; sad, but necessary. I said nothing but decided to contact the kind couple at the B&B soon, to ask if they knew of anyone who would like to buy an old upright piano.
Glenfield House was beginning to look a little more like my own property, but it was in desperate need of work and decoration. The walls were panelled with tongue-and-groove V-lined wood throughout the original part of the house, apart from the sitting room where the front wall was covered with hardboard that had warped because the house had been left sitting empty for so long. There was plasterboard on the walls of the newer back extension and the bathroom was part V-lined, part plasterboard. The tiles in the shower cubicle were beginning to pull away from the wall; a sharp knock would have had them all off like a pack of cards. General disuse had left the house damp and the walls stained by rusty nail marks or mould. The plasterboard in the extension felt clammy to the touch and was beginning to crumble and peel. My worst nightmares were not a complete fantasy.
I was yet to experience the floating lino in the bathroom. When it rained for more than two days, water found its way into the porous rock at the back of the house and ran under the cement floor. When the pressure reached a certain point it forced water upwards, welling through the floor, flooding the bathroom and lifting the lino. Wellies were essential for using the loo and lots of old towels required to soak up the wet. In extreme cases the water ran out of the bathroom door and through the back hall like a micro delta, flowing on down into the kitchen. Also, if I were bathing in the peat stained, cast-iron bath and it was raining outside, I got used to sitting to one side of the tub, as every so often ice-cold rainwater dripped down into the bath from the wood-lined ceiling. Not always in the same place. It was often the first shock of cold on some different part of the anatomy that indicated where it was coming from. A well-placed warmed flannel on the affected part of the body would allow time for a soak in the bath without trying to be a contortionist. It got to the stage when I was grateful that the leak from the ceiling was over the bath and not adding to the water on the floor.
There were various leaks in both old and newer parts of the house, but on the whole the older part was drier. Some leaks either seemed to seal themselves or only occurred in certain wind directions. Rotted window frames let draughts in. The back door, its green paint peeling off, was warped and needed to be booted open or shut commando style. The little side room in the extension was so damp that I used it as a storeroom for anything that was not valuable or water-soluble. However, the main windows at the front of the house were in good order, as was the front door.
As the house slowly dried out the wooden planks in the kitchen began to decay very rapidly (I know now that it was dry rot). I found off-cut pieces of hardboard inside the old dry-stone shed in the front garden and nailed them over the worst parts, hiding the evidence with rugs. After a while, I became quite adept at avoiding the most fragile parts of the floor. I realised it was a good job I never did manage to get a surveyor to come and look at the house though I don’t think it would have made a lot of difference to my decision even if I had. The state of the house was depressing, but I was also filled with optimism and ignorance.
In the beginning, I still stubbornly held on to the fantasy that the structural and decorative issues of my new home would be sorted out within a fairly short space of time. I was still thinking with ‘mainland infrastructure’ logic; overly optimistic about my ability not only to find money for materials, but also the transport and skilled workers who would magically appear to come and do the work. The stumbling block over my piano should have taught me something but it hadn’t. For the time being I had to be content with pulling away damp, warped hardboard from the front sitting room wall and windowsill. Behind it I found a drystone wall that had once been held together with lime and sand mortar. It just crumbled away and poured out over the floor as soon as I touched it. There were tiny little limpet and seashells in it. I would have to repoint that wall. Must get some sand and cement, I thought. Despite everything, I was starting to love Glenfield House.
CHAPTER SIX
Sheep, sharks and settlers
It’s time I told you more about the Isle of Soay, although in those early weeks of my arrival I had no knowledge of the island’s past or the people who had left their mark on the land. Today all you have to do is key
‘Soay, Skye’ into a search engine and up comes Wikipedia and a Google map showing how the island sits, tucked into the southwest coast of Skye. In 1990 there was absolutely nothing I could research about Soay – there was no Google, no Wikipedia, indeed there was no Internet at all – and I had moved to live on the island as ignorant as when I went to see it for the first time. The only information I had came from John Gilbertson’s very quick potted history of the people living there at the time. I even met a few locals in Broadford and Elgol who thought that Soay was completely uninhabited and barren.
In fact the island – a rough figure of eight shape, four miles long and two miles wide – is often surprisingly rich and lush. As I explored on foot (there is no other way) I discovered that Soay’s terrain can vary enormously; from sheltered woodlands around the harbour and deeper glens, to windswept and weathered moorland on the west looking out toward the distant Outer Hebrides. (Soay belongs to the Inner Hebrides like its nearer neighbours, the Small Isles of Canna, Eigg, Rum and Muck.)
Soay is cut almost in two by the long and relatively shallow harbour to the northwest and here the land rises steeply covered by mature trees. Mostly birch and rowan but intermingled with willow, hazel and the occasional oak; their entwined branches often festooned with hanging honeysuckle and exotic looking lichens. During that first summer I found the stepped cliffs beneath the trees are crowded with large feathered ferns and long grasses. Crowberry, bog myrtle, wild herbs and mosses find a tenuous foothold in the shallow topsoil. Bluebells, primroses, foxgloves, wood anemones and wild pansies grow there too.
It is also, as I mentioned earlier, the home of a large, raucous and thriving heronry. The left-hand side of the harbour is a little more exposed to gales and fairly absent of trees toward the seaward end. But trees still cling to cliff edges and there’s a more gentle wooded incline toward Soay’s highest point, Beinn Bhreac (Speckled Mount), only about 137 metres (450–465 feet) above sea level. Without the looming presence of the Cuillin Mountains, Soay would look rather flat and forlorn.
