by Anne Cholawo
Neither of us ever mentioned the fracas over his oars again. A little later, Oliver put down a bigger mooring for the Heron.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Snow and drought
‘It never snows on Soay,’ some very nice people who own a holiday cottage on the island once told me, ‘the island is so near to sea level.’ I had no reason to doubt them. They had been coming to the island for their holidays for many years before I arrived. I know differently now. Soay is very close to sea level, but I can say quite categorically that it does snow here. Not every year and not always for long, but Soay can be as thickly blanketed as any Highland hillside in winter.
I remember one December in particular. Christmas Eve started out as a beautiful sunny day; so nice, in fact, that I decided to do my washing and hang it out on the line. That evening the clothes were hard with frost so I decided to leave them until next morning when the sun might warm them up a bit. The stars were sparkling in a clear sky. I made myself a hot water bottle and went to bed with a good book to read by candlelight.
I am a heavy sleeper, so it was not until Christmas morning that I woke to the sound of a strong wind. I looked out of the bedroom window onto a changed world. Snow lay deep, transforming the familiar landscape, and a blizzard swept horizontally past my window. Remembering my washing was still on the line, I got dressed and dashed out to rescue it. There was not one piece of clothing or even a peg left on the clothesline. A cursory look around the garden was not productive. I didn’t see a solitary sock.
Snow fell off and on for another two or three weeks and for at least a month the temperature never rose above freezing. It was not long before there was nearly four inches of compacted snow above my doorstep, as hard as rock and twice as slippery. I needed a pickaxe to break the ice. Sub-zero temperatures froze the water pipes to most of the island properties, and for weeks no one had a proper water supply. I had to make sure my header tank was kept filled with water otherwise I couldn’t use the Rayburn, which was essential for keeping the house warm. Sometimes, I filled buckets of snow and left them near the Rayburn overnight, but they were often still half full of snow the next morning. Luckily, there was an old well to the rear of a ruined blackhouse not far from Glenfield. It was surrounded by a stone wall with a large slab of flat rock on top. The water came from an underground spring and did not freeze, protected as it was by the stone lid and the undergrowth around it. I could reach down into the well with a jug and fill buckets of water; enough to keep me fairly well supplied.
The cesspit was a different matter and something I had not taken into account during the freeze. The cold was so intense that it froze the sewage pipe and the contents of the concrete tank, neither of which was deeply buried because the area is mostly just a raised beach. I was blissfully unaware of this until one morning when I went to use the ‘facilities’. During the freeze I filled the toilet cistern with a bucket to flush the loo. On this particular day, I flushed the loo only to find that the toilet bowl filled up, and up, and up, until it overflowed onto the bathroom floor. After an extensive clean up, the toilet was no longer useable for the foreseeable future and I had to resort to an old ceramic chamber pot a friend had bought me for a joke as a house-warming present. As if in Victorian times, I got into the routine of emptying the contents in a responsible manner every day. On the up side however, the snow on the roof was so thick that it hermetically sealed the heat inside the house. That made the interior temperature several degrees higher than normal and I was quite warm and cosy inside during the cold weather.
Wildlife and sheep suffered badly in the thick snow and extreme cold. I went out regularly to break the ice on drinking holes for the sheep and birds. The island birds were starving, and became very tame during the cold spell. I felt compelled to feed them, so I shared the Christmas cake and Christmas pudding sent by friends and family. Blackbirds, chaffinches, dunnocks and hoodie crows were all practically eating out of my hand. I even started baking extra loaves for the birds when I was making bread for myself. Apart from the distress of the hungry wildlife, the surrounding scenery was a beautiful sight. Snow covered everything, hill and crag, all the way from the top of the Cuillin Mountains right down to sea level. The sky was a crowded mass of dirty pink clouds bloated with potential snowfall, the sea as black as pitch.
That New Year’s Eve we were invited to Oliver and Donita’s house to celebrate. It had hardly stopped snowing since Christmas Eve and the ground was thickly covered. Jill and I set off with our party clothes packed in rucksacks on our backs. It was roughly a mile from our houses to the Davies’ place and the rough track was now several inches deep in packed snow. Not the best terrain for high heels and party dresses.
Winter days being so short, it had been dark for several hours before we left. We hadn’t gone far when the slow, gentle snowfall turned bitterly vicious. A northwesterly wind blew up and by the time we reached the hill by the BT windmills, we were facing a full-scale blizzard. The snow drove horizontally across our path and Jill and I ended up walking one behind the other. At one point, I looked up and glanced ahead to see Jill in the light of my torch trudging head down in thick outdoor gear with an enormous rucksack on her back. It looked oddly familiar. Then I remembered seeing old black-and-white film footage of explorers stumbling along, leaning into the wind and moving in single file through Arctic wastes or climbing Everest. It felt very much like that.
After seeing in the New Year in our party finery we changed back into our all-weather gear and headed for home. By now, the snow had stopped falling but we were hampered by other disabilities: too much to drink and the path had been obliterated by a new layer of snow. Tex was with us and there were many deviations, much cursing, falling into ditches and a lot of arguing about who actually knew where the track lay before we got as far as Soay House and Tex was deposited home. The next morning, still a little hung-over, I thought it might be prudent to check up on Old Chap. We had dumped him at his home pretty unceremoniously and, although he had a very independent nature, he was getting on in years. I arrived at his house and tapped on the door. Getting no response I walked into the hall and called out. There was a vague mumbling from the kitchen, so I went in to check that everything was all right. I found him slumped on a hard kitchen chair next to the Rayburn. He looked up as I came into the room and I saw that he was still wearing his coat and wellingtons – and had a deeply grooved red mark right across his forehead.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, concerned.
‘Of course. You can see that, can’t you?’
Yes, but what’s happened to your head?’
‘What do you mean?’ He sounded surprised.
‘There’s a great big groove across it.’
He rubbed at his forehead, got up and hobbled over to a nearby mirror to have a look.
‘Oh that,’ he said, without much interest. ‘When I got in last night, I sat down by the Rayburn to get warm and must have fallen asleep with my head on the towel rail.’
He shuffled over to his armchair by the kitchen table and sat in it, fumbling for his pipe.
‘What concerns me more,’ he said sucking on his unlit pipe, ‘is what’s happened to my top set of teeth? And why is my right foot so sore?’
I couldn’t answer those questions. We searched high and low for his teeth in the kitchen without any luck. He said he would walk back along the track later to see if he had lost them on the way home last night.
A few days later, Jill knocked at my door.
‘I had to come round to tell you,’ she said, hardly able to contain herself. ‘Tex has found his teeth!’
Apparently, Tex had been at Jill’s house that morning, drinking tea and still complaining about his lost teeth and sore foot.
‘It must be these damned boots,’ he said, wiggling his leg about, ‘the pain eases off once I’m in bed.’
As he removed his Wellington boot to rub his foot, something rattled and fell on to the floor.
‘My
teeth!’ he exclaimed in delight. ‘Excellent!’ Then he cleaned them off on his trouser leg and popped them back in. They had been stuck in the toe of his boot for about three days. When Tex fell asleep with his head on the towel rail of the Rayburn after the New Year celebrations, his top set had dropped out of his mouth and fallen inside his Wellington boot. In one single act, he had cured his sore foot and found his teeth.
Some weeks into the New Year the snow finally melted and I eventually got water back into the house. Unfortunately, the cold had been so intense that it was a lot longer before my cesspit unfroze and I could use the toilet again but I did find my washing, bit by bit, as the snowline receded over the following weeks.
Snow caused enough problems, but at the other extreme hot weather and drought brought their own difficulties too.
Glenfield water supply was both simple and complicated. There is a freshwater loch about six hundred metres away on the hill behind my house. At that time I had a length of black plastic half-inch pipe – around 450 metres of it – leading overland from the loch. It stopped by the old top garden, well short of the house. Fifty metres from the pipe was a water tank, really just a hole in the ground lined with pond liner and covered with a corrugated iron lid. Several small ditches led to the water tank helping to keep it topped up in wet weather, but the main drainage ditch led from the end of the black pipe to the tank and it had to be kept constantly open. If this main ditch wasn’t cleared regularly, the water from the black pipe just dispersed into the surrounding bog and never reached the tank.
In my first few years on the island, I was always having trouble in keeping the house supplied with water, particularly if we had a couple of weeks without rain. Although the black pipe from the loch was supposed to prevent the tank from running dry, there were faults with this simple system which meant that the siphon was continually disrupted by air intakes. The pipe had many sections and there were no proper connections. In fact the connections were just copper plumbing pipe jammed inside the black plastic and tightened on the outside with jubilee clips. Water pressure invariably pushed the pipes apart letting in air, which destroyed the siphon. To free the airlock I had to go up to the loch and pump water into the pipe with a stirrup pump while standing up to my waist in water. It was cold, inconvenient and very wet.
One hot, dry summer while DJ was visiting, the water tank ran dry. No matter how hard I worked the stirrup pump the siphon lasted only a few hours before stopping again. Fed up, I stopped trying. Surely rain would fall in a few days and solve our problems. Unfortunately it didn’t. We began scouring around for any other convenient water source. Even my trusty old well began to fail with the demands we made on it and had to be kept just for drinking water. There was an old grey barrel full of scummy green water in the garden. Before the drought we had both condemned it unfit for even the direst emergency, but we were driven to it in desperation. When all the nearby burns had dried up, our last option was either to walk a 1,200-metre round trip every day up to the loch, or use the slimy water from the barrel. I rigged up a filter system with an old net curtain and tea towel. We boiled it afterward and used up the last convenient water supply: the ‘condemned barrel’.
Meanwhile, next door, Jill was using seawater to wash her clothes and dishes. At around this time the Marines came for their bi-annual exercises, accompanied as usual by Robert on video camera. When he popped in for a cup of tea I spent most of the time moaning about our water problems. Robert always surprised me by his ability to see a simple solution to almost any practical problem. He suggested I should take the longer section of pipe currently at the bottom of the hill and transfer it to the top. Then the shorter sections of pipe that were causing the siphon to fail would be further down and not sucking in so much air. Robert had to leave for the next part of the Marine exercises so he didn’t have time to find out whether his theory would work. But this did not stop me from chivvying DJ into helping me swap the pipes as soon as possible. We carried the longer, 150-metre, length of pipe to the top of the loch and fitted the end that went into the water with the crude filter I’d made. Then we moved all the other sections down to the lower end. It took a long time but once it was all rearranged I pumped water into the first section until water came out the other end and then I reconnected all the pipes. The siphon never stopped again and carried on until the black pipe was replaced by a new blue one-inch (25cm) water pipe ten years later (this time with the correct connectors). I never suffered a water shortage during summer droughts again.
A little later, Robert also helped us solve Jill’s water problem. Jill and I both had hosepipes. When they were joined they were just long enough to reach from my kitchen tap to Jill’s water tank at the back of her house. After another cup of tea, during that same Marine exercise trip, Robert fixed the two hosepipes together and filled Jill’s tank from my house. From now on this was how we kept Jill’s house supplied with water throughout any prolonged dry spell. It was particularly useful if she had family staying.
Dry weather could be more than simply inconvenient. One very dry March, about two years after the fire at Burnside House, Tex decided that he would do a little burning in an area on the south side of the island. Jeanne had imposed a strict ban on any kind of burning on Soay and there had been no firing of the bracken for a long time. I suspect there must have been some kind of incident years before that caused her to issue this particular edict. Whatever the reason, I was not privy to it. Unfortunately Jeanne was no longer around to put a stop to Tex’s plans. When Tex asked me to help I trusted his competence implicitly and, sharing his pyromaniac leanings, was only too pleased to be involved. Tex wanted to clear an area of overgrown dead heather to improve the grazing for his ponies.
There had been no rain for weeks and grass and dead bracken were as dry as tinder. We traipsed off with a few rags soaked in paraffin, some matches, a blowtorch and two ancient fire beaters. The sun shone with pale wintry warmth and there was a gentle offshore breeze. Tex chose an area close to the edge of a cliff just below the swathe of dead heather he planned to gently burn off. He explained knowledgeably how it was safest to burn against the wind and this would help to keep the fire under close control. We lit the rags and made a neat line of fire in the place Tex indicated through the dry grass.
At first all went to plan and we watched with mutual satisfaction as the fire slowly caught hold of the old, gnarled heather and moved gently along, slowly consuming. Unnoticed by either of us while we were concentrating on our task, the wind shifted slightly and began to grow stronger. Just as we were on the point of beating the edges of the fire out, the flames suddenly leapt up with a violent ferocity and shot away in a direction that neither of us anticipated. We tried our best, but the height of the flames was soon over our heads and travelling faster than we could run. Within minutes it reached the base of a nearby hill where the flames became even more ferocious, racing to the top and setting fire to a small copse of young trees in a sheltered dip. We watched helplessly as the fire increased and headed out across the island, consuming everything in its path.
The extent of the fire could be seen when night fell. In the darkness, from the top of the hill at the back of my house, we could see the fire stretched out in a great glowing line from south to north and heading west toward the back of the island. For three whole days, the fire raged unchecked and out of control. Tex and I were the most unpopular people on the island throughout this time. True to his character, Tex maintained an aura of control and a haughty disregard for the opinion of others. I believe that his outward sangfroid hid his true feelings and he was as anxious as the rest of us. We made firebreaks around the BT huts and windmills to try to protect them, but that was all we could do. On the third night at around ten thirty I got a phone call from Tex asking me to hurry over to Soay House. When I got there I found out why. There was a perfect half circle of fire burning around the back of his property and closing in. We worked together until about three in the morning, beating it out.
Luckily for us, the wind had died down and the fire was not so intense. Tex was keen that we should keep this particular episode a secret.
A day later I walked across to the west coast of the island to check the damage. It was the easiest walk I had ever taken in my many treks across Soay’s usually rough terrain. The tops of the hills were completely devoid of vegetation and everywhere little wisps of smoke were rising from the blackened ground. Luckily the fire did not harm the woods around the harbour and many of the little copses I had feared would be destroyed managed to survive. More importantly, the houses and telephone system were safe and the fire had not leapt across to the north part of Soay as every island resident had imagined it would. Incredibly, a year later the undergrowth had returned and soon young, fresh heather was appearing as well. Two years later and no one would have believed that half of Soay had been almost completely torched.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
End of an era
Life on Soay settled into a new and different routine. With regular access to the Heron, my day-to-day life was concentrated on maintaining an income and helping to meet the practical needs of both Glenfield and Leac Mhor. Tex was alone and, whether he acknowledged it or not, required more support from all of his neighbours. Once, he and Jeanne had been the pivotal and active core of Soay but now that centre had shifted and dispersed.
It was 1997. Early in the morning of the last day of August, I was on my way to one of my favourite winkling haunts. Just as I reached Oliver and Donita’s house, Donita came out looking agitated. That was very unusual for Donita as she always seemed calm and collected. She met me at the front gate, still with a half eaten piece of toast in her hand. She felt she had to share what she had just heard on the radio with someone. Princess Diana had been killed in a car accident in Paris. I was surprised at how shocked I felt over the news. I had never considered myself much of a royalist but it clouded the rest of my day. For once news from outside world had made its way into the island with emotional impact.
