Island on the Edge

by Anne Cholawo

  But daily life on an island brings many distractions and there were other things to think about in 1993. The sound of helicopters was often heard above Soay in a year of accelerating change. The island’s archaic radiophones were about to be replaced by an up-to-date microwave digital signal. Our single solar panel could not produce enough power for the new system so BT decided to replace it with two large Proven windmills and a bank of solar panels. The good news was that each house would have a separate telephone line: no more arguments about who was hogging the line! What’s more we would all be getting new push button telephones. Our ancient dial-up phones could be consigned to the bin. The line quality should be as good as any phone on the mainland, we were told.

  For months the sky was full of helicopters. Equipment and tons of cement were delivered by helicopter for the concrete bases of the windmills and microwave dish. Once the contract-builders had erected the shuttering to hold the cement, helicopters flew backwards and forwards from the mainland hour after hour, day after day, with pre-mixed cement carried in huge tarpaulin bags slung from cables beneath them. Helicopters hovered low over the prepared shuttering and, by some mechanism unknown to me, the bottom of the tarpaulin opened up and released the fluid cement. This went on for weeks until three large concrete plinths and a lower base for the solar panels had been built. Windmills, solar panels and microwave dish post were bolted into place. Then an enormous bank of new batteries arrived to replace the original batteries housed in a shed near the telephone exchange hut.

  When the new system was finally complete the teething problems began. The windmills were built to withstand the most violent of storms, but there were technical difficulties inherent in their design. If you needed an ideal environment to test a windmill design to the limit, I think Soay had almost all the qualifications. The weather might swing from flat calm to a howling storm in a matter of hours. Temperatures could be below zero in the winter or unbearably hot in summer. Not to mention varying falls of rain, hail or snow. While the windmills struggled, there were frequent power failures when we had no communications at all.

  One of the causes was thought to be the public telephone box. The Soay A-B button public analogue telephone was the very last of its type left in Britain. It was housed in the bright red telephone box that sat next to Soay House just off the track looking rather incongruous in its remote environment. It always reminded me of the lamppost in the Narnia woodland of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Jeanne had been for many years the island telephone engineer and keeper of the tin of Post-Office red paint.

  To use the A-B payphone, you picked up the handset and fed coins into a slot at the top of the box. Then you dialled the number you wanted and if someone answered you pressed Button A (to be heard). If no one picked up you pressed Button B to get your money back. Now the box would be fitted with a brand new digital phone system. The brand new digital display screen was in operation twenty-four hours a day and required a considerable amount of electricity from the windmill batteries. A week of calm weather could drain the batteries, and the automatic cut-off switch shut down the power to all the island telephones. In the end, it was decided to remove the phone from the phone box and it was never replaced. The telephone box is still there.

  I think it was a local telephone engineer from Skye who finally solved almost all the technical problems of this type of windmill. Once he had identified and corrected the faults, the system worked extremely well. Gordon then became the official island telephone engineer – maintaining windmills, telephone exchange and any faults occurring on the island landlines – taking over from Jeanne who had held that responsibility for more than thirty years.

  The construction work brought other perks for islanders. Building material of reasonable quality was like gold dust on Soay. Good pieces of driftwood or spilled cargo flotsam were squirreled away for building projects, either planned or as yet unknown. There was always use for good quality wood other than just burning it in the Rayburn. Many covetous looks were aimed at the wood and plywood left redundant after the cement had set.

  I believe every resident who passed the builders making the shuttering said, ‘Can I have that wood when you’ve finished with it?’ In the end, the poor builders didn’t want the responsibility of deciding how to allocate it. Minutes before the contractors were due to leave the island one of them mumbled quickly, almost as one word:

  ‘We’ve-finished-with-the-shuttering-if-you-want-it-bye-bye . . .’

  Then they all jumped into a dinghy and rowed away as fast as they could toward a waiting fishing boat, never to be seen again.

  News of this free wood travelled across Soay like a lightning flash. I was hurrying toward the telephone exchange at speed when Jill caught up with me. We both had different needs (I wanted to keep hens and build a hen house ready for them). We raced neck-and-neck, puffing up the hill and arrived at the windmills together only to find Anne and Gordon had beaten us to it. For a moment we were both very disappointed, even though we knew the ‘first come, first get’ island rule. However, there was a substantial amount of wood and Gordon and Anne had acted with great generosity. Bearing in mind the overwhelming competition for the shuttering, they had made equal piles of wood with the name of each house chalked on top.

  It was many months before I got to claim my pile, but as the Soay rules stood in those days, I knew that it was perfectly safe where it was.

  As spring passed, Jeanne’s illness grew steadily worse. A representative of the MNA had been to visit Jeanne earlier and explained the health risks we would have to look out for. To our surprise, the common cold was one of the most serious as motor neurone disease had affected her breathing and swallowing. If Jeanne contracted a cold, she would have to be airlifted to hospital as soon as possible.

  The family had agreed that when the time came, Jeanne would be airlifted to a hospital in Orkney where she was closer to Duncan and Dianne. It came sooner than we expected. One morning during the first week of June I went to help Jeanne get dressed and she communicated to me that she thought she might have caught a cold. There was not much time to delay. Not to upset Jeanne whose bed was now downstairs in a room right next to the telephone, I went to ask Oliver and Donita to make the necessary phone call from their house and in a remarkably short time the wheels were set into motion. I had barely enough time to get Jeanne ready and to find Tex to tell him that Jeanne would be leaving the island in the next couple of hours before a helicopter arrived to take Jeanne to Orkney. Tex went with her. Within a few weeks, Jeanne had passed away.

  Jeanne’s absence could never be replaced. From now on life for Tex was a struggle however much he pretended otherwise. He probably never realised how much he had depended on Jeanne’s organisational and administrative skills, which she continued to perform right up to the very last hour of her time on Soay. He reacted in the only way he knew how, which was to scorn any effort to help him, and to assume a haughty independence. Perhaps he was unaware of it, or too proud to comment on it, but all of his neighbours helped in many small and significant ways once he was on his own. His household affairs soon began to suffer and he often forgot to order supplies before the mailboat was due – he’d never had to think ahead before. However he fared fairly well for the first year as the larder had been well stocked by Jeanne. It was chock full of supplies that he could use when he forgot to order food.

  In other ways, Tex managed just as he had always done. Fixing and repairing were no problem to him at all and he still had his Highland ponies. In fact, the ponies became his new and absorbing project, a reason to keep going.

  Out of habit, I carried on milking Jeanne’s goats. It was difficult to give up for several reasons. If I had suddenly stopped the goats would have been at risk of getting mastitis and would have suffered without daily attention. Their milk was delicious and beneficial; it would be a shame not to make use of it. Lastly, maybe I also needed to continue a comforting routine in the absence of Jeanne; I enjoy
ed being with the goats and felt a responsibility toward them too. Still, the goats were no longer young. Over the months they began to dry up, luckily without suffering from mastitis. Soon they were no longer in milk and there was no reason for me to call them off the hill, nor was there any incentive for them to come. Eventually, they became feral goats, freely wandering about the island, till old age and infirmity took them one by one.

  * * *

  Gradually, I returned to the old routine of my life before Jeanne’s illness. However, there were a few differences. Two years after the Fitzgeralds’ arrival, in 1992, Peter’s redundancy was no nearer to becoming reality and this made life difficult for them. Peter had purchased his Coble fishing boat in the certainty that he would soon be living on Soay permanently.

  Maintaining any boat is time-consuming and Peter was simply not on the island for long enough to do it properly. He was also travelling many miles between Soay and Liverpool every two weeks or so. The drive was exhausting enough, but then he had to add a two-and-a-half-hour boat trip from Loch Slapin where he kept his boat. It was highly stressful for him. The Coble was an open boat and when it rained she very quickly filled with water. There was no one in Loch Slapin to pump out the water when it was needed, so it was a great worry to Peter if he were not able to make his usual trip up to Soay for any reason. Another concern was that she seemed to be shipping more than the normal amount of seawater while he was away. A combination of heavy rain and her mysterious leak could have serious consequences if the boat were left unattended for too long.

  Jill was not confident enough to handle the boat on her own, so somehow or other Peter and I came to a mutually beneficial arrangement. In return for the Coble’s general maintenance and for taking Peter to and from Elgol, I could use the boat for my own requirements – collecting supplies, friends and family and taking my winkles to Elgol jetty for selling. It suited all of us well. Peter’s boat could stay on Soay where Jill and I could keep her pumped dry. We could use her while Peter was away. And Peter did not have to worry about his unattended boat, or prolong his tiring journey.

  We were all relative amateurs, but needs must. There was only one boat, Oliver’s trawler Golden Isles, fishing regularly from Soay now and Gordon was only using Sea Witch when he was not teaching. What I didn’t know about the ways of large motor vessels, I made up for with enthusiasm – and blithe ignorance of the hazards. A few trips out with Tex in Petros and some half remembered days of sailing when I was a child seemed sufficient at the time.

  * * *

  The only boat I had in my possession at the time was an ancient clinker-built dinghy of about twelve foot (or four metres). She was so old that she did not even have the more commonly used rowlocks but instead ‘thole pins’, two pieces of round wood or doweling (in my case they were metal), rammed into holes drilled through the gunwales. The oars slipped between the two pins. The oars must have been as old as the boat. I had bought the dinghy from Biddy just before she left the island and used it to go around the coast to pick up my bags of winkles. My only other investment was a two-and-a-half-horsepower Seagull outboard that I had purchased from Arisaig Marine. I had a kind of love-hate relationship with that outboard. I know now that it was not the Seagull outboard to blame but my own inexperience. I didn’t know that petrol loses its volatility after being stored in a can for a certain amount of time. Seagull engines in particular need fresh fuel to work reliably. I couldn’t buy fuel on a regular basis, so the petrol was often fairly old. Even so, with my dinghy and newly acquired outboard, I could now expand my winkle territory. There were certain risks to this newfound enterprise, though.

  It was the first day of April 1994 and the weather was just perfect for going around to Port an t’Seilisdeir (Port of the Flag Iris), on the far west coast of Soay, to pick up the bags of winkles that had accumulated over there during the past few spring tides. There was a gentle easterly wind, which meant that the sea state on the other side of the island would be flat calm and ideal for beaching the boat. I was down on the shoreline near Leac Mhor, pulling my boat in on my running mooring when Jill came down the beach toward me, carrying a lifejacket.

  ‘Why don’t you take this? You never know when you might need one.’

  I couldn’t see the need for it myself. I would only be motoring a little way offshore and if the boat capsized or sank under me, I could easily swim ashore and walk home – I was a confident swimmer. However, it was a thoughtful gesture and as Jill had come down specially to lend me the lifejacket, I could not turn her down. I privately decided on a compromise. I thanked her, took the lifejacket and put it in the bottom of the boat before puttering off around the south coastline with my smoky, periodically farting, old outboard.

  I beached in the little sandy cove at Port an t’Seilisdeir and tied the painter of the dinghy to a convenient rock. I noticed that the tide was coming in when I was doing this, but felt sure there was plenty of time to collect all the bags lying in various coves round and about before the water reached the boat. It was a glorious day. There was not a cloud in the sky and the sea was a lustrous azure with little sparkles of sunlight running along its surface. Even the Outer Isles were clearly visible, shimmering on the horizon. They are not often visible from Soay and it’s a good sign of settled weather. After loading the boat with all the bags that I had stashed nearby, I remembered one lone bag in a cove a little further along the coast. It wouldn’t take me long to walk there and carry it back, so I set off to fetch it.

  It must have taken much longer than I had realised. As I came back over the hill with the bag of winkles on my shoulder I saw my little boat and all her cargo, drifting out to sea. By the time I reached the beach the boat had drifted beyond the shelter of land and was picking up speed, heading out into the Atlantic. The tide had come in fast, lifting the head-rope off the rock that I had tied it to and she had slipped away in the offshore breeze.

  For what felt an awfully long time I just stood at the water’s edge wondering what to do. The boat had already passed what I would normally consider a safe distance to swim. However, the boat represented my means of earning a living. It also contained several hundred pounds worth of winkles and I needed that money for bills and groceries. I decided I had no choice. There was too much to lose. I would have to swim out to the boat and try to get on board.

  I was suddenly aware of how very lonely and remote it was on this side of the island. Neither sight nor sound of any ship or boat from horizon to horizon. My first impulse was to dive recklessly into the sea but some instinct for survival made me stop. I remembered what I had learned in the Venture Scouts about the dangers of hypothermia. The spring equinox had just passed and the sea would be exceedingly cold. I would need dry clothes to wear when I came out of the sea. I stripped down to nothing and then I had this peculiar thought.

  ‘What if I drowned in my attempt to swim out to the boat? If my body was found later, people might think I had committed suicide. How very embarrassing!’

  I put my knickers back on as a precaution against that particular assumption and instantly felt much happier. I left the rest of my clothes in a heap on a dry rock higher up the beach.

  The water was unbelievably cold. But at least that meant my whole body went completely numb and it no longer felt as if it belonged to me. As I struck out for the boat, roughly three hundred metres away, it looked like a little black dot in the distance and I just hoped it wasn’t beyond my stamina. Oddly, apart from a vague fear of getting cramp the only thought in my mind was to reach and recover my boat. Luckily, I was a much fitter person than I had been when I first arrived on Soay and I made the distance to the boat relatively easily even though it was tiring.

  A problem that had not occurred to me until I reached the boat, however, was how to get into it? Even loaded down with winkles, the sides of the boat towered above me and whichever side I tried, even at the stern, I could not get myself high enough up to heave myself over the gunwales. This was far more exhausting
than the swim out to the boat and I was beginning to get just a tiny bit anxious. Then I saw the lifejacket Jill had given me, lying in the bottom of the boat. Using one of the oars I managed to shift the jacket near enough for me to grab it. With some difficulty, because my fingers were numb, I got into it and belted it on. Immediately, the effort of keeping myself afloat in the water was alleviated and I could rest and think of what to do next.

  There was really only one thing I could do from where I was down in the water and that was to tow the boat back to the beach. I tied the head-rope around my waist and, with a sort of sidestroke, slowly swam the boat back to the shore. With the lifejacket on I could stop to rest every so often, which was a relief. Everything was much easier once the boat was within the shelter of the land and there was less resistance as I towed the boat through the water. Soon, I was wading up the sandy beach dragging my boat behind me until I was finally almost ashore. My clothes were only a few feet away sitting on top of a tiny rocky island, surrounded by the incoming tide. I whisked them off just before a wave washed over the rock. They were still dry. I was very glad to have had the lifejacket Jill lent me to hand that day. I had learnt another valuable lesson: among the many variants in life’s mishaps, there is always one that you haven’t thought of.

  Best of all, as I motored home with a boat full of winkles on that glorious evening, it felt good to be alive.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Adventures with the Heron

  When Peter first brought his new boat over to Soay in 1992, she arrived with a ridiculously undignified name crudely painted on her prow. I can’t quite remember what she was called, but it was something like Who Cares; hardly in keeping with her new life. A boat should have a proper name, even if is for nothing more practical than giving it out over VHF radio in times of trouble at sea. Boats have souls, especially if they are made of wood, and they need to be given a name worthy of them. Peter decided to call his boat the Heron and I painted two name plates for him to be attached either side of her prow. She became the focal point of our lives for several years.