Boreas Domus Mare Amicus

(the north our home, the sea our friend)

~~~~~

“Now tell me this,” said Edwin Harrold, with a twinkle in his eye and a much-too-solemn face, “if a hen and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many eggs will three hens lay in three days?”

Oh, no, it was riddle time, and there was no right answer; some of the possible replies were

1. 3 eggs, the expected answer?

2. you can’t have half-hens laying half-eggs, true but boring

3. 6 eggs, disappointing?

Which would be best? #1 would give the pleasure of seeing the ferrylouper (incomer) fall into the trap; #2 would label you as an anorak; #3 would be a nuisance – a more cunning trap needed.

But it was too wondrous a place to worry overmuch, because we were in Happy Valley, which Edwin had created out of a rather dismal stretch of moorland, converting it into a tiny paradise by planting trees and creating waterfalls in the little burn. Edwin’s house grew heather on its roof and had an electric light bulb which lit up when Edwin pulled a wire which caused a little paddle-wheel to dip into the water of the burn and generate electricity.

Edwin is no more, but he typified all that was attractive in the Orcadian: a fine craftsman, inventive, independent, happy with a kind of life that had hardly changed (except for the wire and the light bulb) in the last many thousands of years. Before retiring, he had repaired ancient monuments such as brochs for a living, and one could easily imagine him building a broch and living in it, cosily and efficiently, peaceful but ready to repel any invader, whether by riddle or by even sterner measures.

The ferrylouper had to be assessed to find out whether and where it might fit into the community, and was subjected to many tests, though none of them quite as difficult as the Happy Valley Inquisition. “What do you think of Orkney butter/cheese/homebrew?” was easy. But it was also very easy to put a foot wrong, through blind southern habit. There was a day that we took the canoe to Harray Loch, paddled up to the other end, a distance of about 4.5 miles, and beached the canoe, intending to walk back to the car; but no need, for up drove our car, helmed by our postman, who gently let us know the error of our big-city ways: “You’d taken the keys, so I had to hot-wire her.” We grovelled; but at least we hadn’t locked her, for we were learning.

We had arrived in the winter of 1968-69, and since there were no teacher’s houses available in Stromness itself, we were housed in Kirbister schoolhouse three miles or so away; “Will your man put you to the school?” asked the Director of Education, revealing an expectation of feminine inability that had long since vanished farther south; legend had it that the last teacher at this school had been a stern woman who made the children cut her grass with nail-scissors – a teaching practice unknown in the south. And there was plenty of grass to cut, for the school had an acre of land, some of it tarmacked but all the rest grass and wild flowers.

the road was drifted in

It was an interesting winter, with a lot of snow drifting in wind which reached over 100 knots before it blew away the Kirkwall airport anemometer. In our house drifts of snow piled up inside tightly closed windows, and when I went out to fetch coke for the stove I was blown away up the iced tarmac and had to crawl back. The road was drifted in, but it was not too far to walk to Stromness, so long as I started about an hour earlier than usual; one morning when I set out around 7:30, with the full moon shining on an unnaturally windless and totally silver landscape and not a human nor a vehicle to be seen for miles, I have to confess that I turned back, with the excuse that the two-thirds of the pupils who were bussed in from the country would not be going to school that day. An inglorious decision, but a beautiful day, in which we built an igloo, and took a candle into it that evening and sat very cosily in sleeping-bags reading our books.

“The sea our friend” says Orkney’s coat of arms but the sea around Orkney has strong tidal currents; an online pilotage guide for small craft advises how to navigate the Pentland Firth:

when a swell is opposed to the tidal stream, a sea is raised which can scarcely be imagined by those who have never experienced it; and, if … the wind is light and with the stream, a sailing vessel becomes unmanageable.

The morning of 18 March 1969, when the maroon went off, I was teaching, and was struck by the indrawn breath and absolute silence in class; all eyes were fixed on the window, which looked out over the harbour. They knew what it meant, though I did not, having been in Orkney less than four months.

It meant a call-out for the lifeboat, all of whose crew were known to, or even fathers of, the pupils, most of whom also knew the reason for the call-out: the Longhope lifeboat had gone missing in the Pentland Firth the previous night, in a force 9 gale and 60-foot waves, on her way to help the Irene, in difficulties off the coast of South Ronaldsay. The Irene ran aground, and all her crew were rescued by breeches buoy, but the lifeboat had disappeared.

Later that day she was found, capsized, the entire crew drowned, a man lost from every home in the tiny community where the lifeboat was based. If 130,000 men were wiped out today in Edinburgh in the space of 24 hours it would parallel that catastrophe in numbers, but not in personal grief unless the 130,000 were all neighbours and friends of the entire population of Edinburgh; worse still, two families had each lost a father and two sons - what sort of parallel could you find for that in a big city? It was an incident in the face of which mere statistics tell you little of importance.

As this dire news trickled in, the whole island grieved, for, as we were coming to realise, this was a place where John Donne’s famous lines

no man is an island, entire of itself; … any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee

were part of the way of life for people needing to survive in a small group of islands nearer Norway than London.

So much for Mare Amicus. Perhaps Orcadians called the sea “friendly” in the same spirit that the ancient Greeks called the Furies Eumenides  – “kindly”?

Old Man of Hoy

Our travel between Orkney and Scotland was usually two hours in the Ola, passing Hoy and its Old Man, across the Pentland Firth to Scrabster; it could be a lovely journey or unlovely-going-on-horrendous. One return to Stromness after a holiday south with the three bairns lives in the memory. Leaving Scrabster the word was that it was too bad to go the usual route west of Hoy, so we’d head eastwards and get into the shelter of Scapa Flow. Not many minutes out of Scrabster, mass passenger-puke started, and the luggage began to slither to and fro across the floor. Time passed, and the entrance to the Flow drew nearer, but so did the cliffs as the Ola fought against the tide-race off Hoxa Head (probably where the Longhope lifeboat had capsized), a fight that the tide-race won, so back up the Pentland Firth we lurched, past the awesome western cliffs of Hoy, round the corner into Hoy Sound, and finally into Stromness Harbour, where the luggage settled, colour returned to the passengers’ faces and, after more than seven hours, we were home. Well nearly, because there was no-one to meet us, the spouse having given up on us and gone to a party. But a car pulled up, its door opened and our doctor said “You’ll be needing a lift” and took us out to Kirbister.

In one day, the worst and the best aspects of life on an island. Hardly blemished even by finding the sink in the schoolhouse piled with a fortnight’s worth of washing-up.

~   ~   ~   ~   ~

coat of arms, 1975

Boreas Domus: now that the north was our home, how appealing was the landscape to the eye of a mountain addict?

At first, unexciting: fields, fences, a bit of moorland, no rocks, no trees. But the periphery, cliffs interrupted by the occasional beach, was where the buzz lay. The coast near Yesnaby was just two miles away across moorland from our house; and there were miles of cliffs, caves, geos, sea stacks; in a few places one could get down to sea level, where on a stormy day the ground could be covered by sinister foam over welly-boot-height: sinister, because there was no telling what (if anything) lay underneath it, and because a big wave could come in and suck you away unless you kept a look out and were nimble; mostly the cliffs leaned outwards, and only from down at sea level could you see the caves that crouched below the overhang. The local wisdom was that Orkney was gradually tilting over to the west, whereas the rest of UK was tilting to the east; where, I wondered was the place where the two opposing tilts were grinding past each other – perhaps the middle of the Pentland Firth? No one would hazard a guess, or perhaps it was an ignorant question.

Yesnaby Castle

Two sea-stacks south of Yesnaby were once arches jutting out from the land until the middle of the arch collapsed into the sea; this was how the Old Man of Hoy had morphed from headland in 1750 to arch by 1820 and later become a stack (“ - for now!”, as scottishgeology.com gleefully adds).

interesting rock detail

Near Yesnaby was an arch across which you could reach a platform allowing a fine view of the cliff face; I went there a lot, with caution because a sudden gust of wind could easily hurl you down past all that interesting rock detail and smash you on the spikiness at its base, and also because the whole structure had the feel of something that might collapse at any time. I confided this thought to the local wisdom, a fount of geographical lore, and it bent on me a patronising smile of sympathy for my cowardice and said “It’s been there for thousands of years, it won’t be collapsing any time soon” – a train of logic that I found odd, considering the history of the Old Man of Hoy, and decided to stay cautious, fearful and (hopefully) unsmashed.

The next week end I went back to exercise my fearful caution once more … and it was gone. The whole lot, arch and platform, had fallen into the sea, and near the edge, where it had connected with the land, the ground now sported a series of parallel cracks, as though great chunks of the cliff edge were just about to dive off after their brothers into the friendliness of the sea.

moors near Yesnaby in winter

Often I would walk from Kirbister across the moorland to reach the cliffs; half–way there was a tiny tree, a prostrate juniper roughly two inches tall; I used to bend down and sniff its leaves for the gorgeous smell of gin that it gave off; one warm day I lay down beside it for a prolonged gin-snuffle and became aware that the ear pressed to the ground could hear the booming of the sea sucking in and out of the caves far below, a mile away from the edge of the land. Suddenly it felt like being on a honeycomb rather than solid ground.

Yesnaby, looking south to Hoy

There was a misty winter day when I’d left home later than usual, and darkness fell before I’d reached the sea, but I kept on, thinking no wind, not too cold, if necessary I could follow the cliffs north to Yesnaby and return by road. As heather and peat underfoot gave way to grass and gravel I knew that the edge of the cliffs must be near, but could see nothing through the foggy darkness. Until the feet stopped of their own accord and the ears told me that something had changed – there was a low echoing mutter that had not been there a second ago. As I stood there the mist drifted and parted, and I saw that I was standing a few inches from the edge, where the next step would have been my last … if the old lizard brain hadn’t done its job.

After all, this northern home, this friendly(?) sea had its excitements.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Heptade of the Were-Toad

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are lots of downsides in the later stages of pregnancy: two of the less gross ones are not being able to breathe lying down and having to lean back to counterbalance the weight. You long for it to be over, and simultaneously dread the process of getting it over, and the quality of the life-after is hazy and uncertain. But the magic of hormones takes care of some of the fear and angst, because you become unnaturally calm in the face of the unknown, though unwontedly irritable with your partner.

You have changed shape, your physical and emotional balance is altered, you are now a were-toad, dragging your massive belly around searching for strange foods. Or a were-jellyfish, floating mindlessly in the warm sea of ignorance, stinging anyone who swims too near. What it must be like to be the partner of a person who has suddenly become a were-toad/jellyfish is beyond imagining.

Of course, everyone’s experience is different, this is only mine, a person who had not troubled to find out much about the production and rearing of offspring, and lacked the skills necessary to survive in this strange new landscape. At some phase of the nine months it takes to make a new person I was aware of an enormous door hissing shut on all the accumulated skills of the previous 31 years and opening on to a quite unfamiliar prospect, a kind of Desert of Unknowingness: I was now no longer a mountaineer or linguist or mathematician, I was Elderly Prim, a piece of meat a bit past its use-by date.

Prim not in its normal sense but short for primigravida, pregnant for the first time (discounting any that got away in a miscarriage). And “elderly” is “over-25, or -30 or -40” or whatever is currently believed to be the maximum desirable age for women to reproduce. Women, not men. It’s perfectly OK for a 90-year old man to reproduce, cheers. This is not unfair dealing, just a fact of life.

So as the great door hissed shut and blotted out the familiar terrain of the past it was like being parachuted onto the great Cairngorm plateau at midwinter in a whiteout, with no map, compass or whistle to blow for help; I could walk straight over the edge without even knowing it was there; too cold to stop, too lost to turn back, the only thing to do was keep on, and hope. What a fine source of metaphor is the mountain!

No good now comes of consulting the wisdom of the ancients: they were almost all blokes, and all they wrote about was bloke stuff – war, politics, law, how to build aqueducts, chaps in wee boats being blown hither and thither in the Mediterranean – interesting enough in its way but largely irrelevant to the conduct of a pregnancy.

Fortunately for the survival of the human (or any) race, ignorance hardly matters. The organism knows what to do, at a level even more basic than the old lizard brain (which spends the months snoozing with its feet up, unless there is an emergency) and just carries on with all that fantastically clever cell-division, organisation of specialised bits, checking that the feet are on the right way round and timing of the escape mechanism, without you having to do or think anything. All you have to do is obey commands: if it says “eat coal” or “drink lemon juice”, you need to eat coal or drink lemon juice for whatever component is the chemical that the organism needs. And on the process goes, unstoppable.

During this time, agitation and speculation from the big brain would be a nuisance, hindering the basic organism’s smooth operation, but luckily a peculiar calm fogs the little grey cells and sends them to lie about sleepily in hammocks with flowers in their hair; until the moment comes when the GP sends you to hospital, whereupon the peaceful reliance on basic organism is stopped in its tracks, and the wonders of medicalization take over.

The process should have been medicalized much earlier, for there existed pre-natal clinics that one was supposed to attend; but I went to only one, and it was so reminiscent of a combination of Kafka and Primary School - mindless bureaucracy coupled with infantile bullying - that I never went back.

Arriving at the hospital, I was told “It’s the wrong day, the clinic’s on Tuesday.” When I said the GP had told me to come, they asked “What  for?” I think the bump wasn’t showing as much as it ought to. Eventually they admitted me and the process of humiliation began. The elderly prim had no name, it was simply “mother”, with a note of exasperation, the very word spat out like a curse. Hearing the well-known and beloved note of my Ariel coming into the parking, I remarked “That’s my bike, that’ll be my husband,” and they tutted at me as if I’d lost my marbles. The moment when push came to shove arrived, and the nurse said “O gawd, what am I supposed to do?” and scurried away to get her Ladybird Book of Midwifery. Not reassuring.

I’m exaggerating a bit, of course, it wasn’t a Ladybird book.

(The next two births were at home, a much cosier experience; and from what I hear, a hospital birth now is very different from what it used to be.)

Back home, not only did a succession of hormones rage on and on, but there were the well-known sleep-deprivation effects, used to torture the captive for as long as humans have wanted to be nasty to each other:

Sleep deprivation can cause impaired memory and cognitive functioning, decreased short term memory, speech impairment, hallucinations, psychosis, … stress, anxiety and depression. (The Justice Campaign: Torture Techniques used in Guantanamo)

Mm, yes. And sleep-deprivation was visited on me in spades by this new tiny creature. Now not only had I turned into a were-toad in a Cairngorm white-out but I was becoming a hallucinating, psychotic, stressed, anxious and depressed were-toad. What hope was there for the future of Kay, the new child?

You might easily think “None”. But fortunately for Kay and all new humans, at the basic animal level we inherit millions of years of experience in how to produce and rear a child, and the basic animal cares not at all for the mutterings of that big useless lump of grey matter beneath the skull, its doubts, its worries, its ignorance; the animal just keeps going, day after day, probably copying what its own mother did, way back, and - with luck - the new creature survives and grows.

And the most astonishing thing happens. You fall in love, not the wishy-washy love of the romantic novel, not the lust of the bodice-ripping Sir Jasper, but a determination to do everything needed for the creature’s survival, even at the cost of your own health, sanity or, if necessary, life. Because it has been part of you and always will be, in some degree.

But it is also, of course, its own self, and that’s another source of wonderment: that this new human, with hardly any experience of life, already has its own personality, different from yours or your partner’s, different from subsequent siblings’, something entirely its own; where did that come from? Fascinating to live with and watch what happens.

creatures with their own personality

These are the features that gradually unfold as the mist dissipates and the view becomes clearer: love, wonder and fascination, and the daily grind necessary to enable the continued survival of the loved, wonderful, fascinating creatures that - in spite of all your ignorance - you have produced. Wherever you go in the future, whatever job you undertake, they are your primary concern; and if that alters where you might go or what you might do for a living, so be it.

Later on the wonderful creatures will come to rebel; they will ignore your advice, despise your habits, laugh merrily at your food, clothes, language, music … go their own way as independent people, as they must do. And you may feel the occasional surge of irritation, but you don’t really mind, because it’s so fascinating. As if you were watching a David Attenborough wildlife series, day after day. No way would I want to live for ever, but it would be most entertaining to be able to survive in the form of a succession of flies on the wall, simply watching what happens next.

So, during a seven-year stretch (a heptade) in the ‘60s, Kay, Cee and Em entered the world in Edinburgh, each in a different place, for our moves during those years were frequent. At the start of the heptade I was a singleton, a teacher in Crieff living for weekends; by the end of it I was part of a tribe, learning how to live the tribal life, and - after entrepreneurial rise and fall - a teacher once more, without having yet properly emerged from the condition of hallucinating psychotic were-toad/jellyfish, possibly delusional about the wondrousness of the small people of the tribe. And living now in Orkney, an unfamiliar place, among a people with a way of life and culture rather different from what I’d been used to, but a place and people that taught me, during the next three heptades, far more about living than I ever taught them about the ancient culture and language that it was my job to reveal.

But Orkney needs a whole post to itself, perhaps even more than one.

Utter Bloody Madness

Or so said those of our friends who knew anything about Business. And they were right, for we were scarily ignorant.

And yet it seemed a good idea. On the one hand, here were we, looking for a way to make a living, and one of us with huge expertise in the world of racing dinghies; and over there were numerous dinghy sailors who could find no place locally to buy the necessary fittings, rope and paint. If we could find a place to operate from and induce suppliers to give us stock on credit, we could make a start and see if it would work.

Hence the birth of the Boat Shop, in a mews in a posh bit of the New Town. In no time at all the Jack Holt dinghy fittings, the International paint and the Marlow rope were flying off the shelves, and any empty space was filling up with bits of paper, some of it printed, called Invoice and (presently) Statement, some of it handwritten notes saying, e.g., “Fred: 2 yellow 1 black”, some of it banknotes escaping from the Shoebox of Takings, which doubled as the Shoebox of Lunch Money.

It took only a few days to realise that the paperwork had to be conquered, that we were the army that must conquer it, since who else was there? And yet how? We did not even know what an invoice was, nor had we much idea how to keep track of what our customers had taken and how to extract an appropriate amount of money from them. The task looked impossible.

If you had a problem in the extremely olden days you might use the technique of the sortes Vergilianae: you shut your eyes, let your Aeneid fall open, stabbed the page with a finger and read the wisdom of the stabbed line. So, for example, if your finger stabbed v.143:

convulsum remis rostrisque tridentibus aequor

“Aha!” you would cry, “the sea convulsed with oars and three-pronged beaks  - this surely means put in an order for oars and … eh, toasting-forks? Can that be right?” Such was the Wisdom of the Ancients.

However, what we chanced to have handy was not the Aeneid but a booklet full of quotes from Napoleon, and we reckoned that this would serve the same purpose. After all, had he not been a great strategist? His ideas could well be helpful.

So we let the booklet fall open and stabbed it.

     impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools

Fine, OK. But something more positive, please, M. Bonaparte?

     never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake

Hm, good thinking, but surely for a world more savage than the world of bits of boats. Give him a last try.

     an army marches on its stomach

Yes! At last, the message: go and have lunch.

Napoleon being short of advice for the war against paper, we applied for help to the spouse’s mother who, it turned out, knew how to do this stuff, and set us up with a simple, easy system and an explanation of what and when and how and why.

Other pieces of advice came our way. A wealthy customer, as he loaded a mass of rope and paint into his car, advised us: “If anyone doesn’t pay after you’ve sent your final demand, take him to court, or he won’t respect you.” He was the only customer who never paid us.

the ice yacht at Newhaven

Soon we needed more space, and we moved into a shop down in Newhaven, opposite the Chain Pier Bar. (This was where the ice yacht described in Ready About took shape.) Furnished with used egg-crates, it allowed a better display, and it had a basement where we could cook lunch and do the paperwork.

By this time I was pregnant and beginning to find the future bleak, for we were still living with the in-laws and although the shop was going well we couldn’t see any possibility of buying a place to live. The shop basement was certainly liveable for adults who needed only a sleeping-bag, but it would hardly do for a baby. Or so I thought, but actually I had no idea what a baby might need.

regatta at Loch Earn: spouse, OK dinghy, van

Meantime we still went to regattas, with the van full of things for sale, so that it was not easy to live in. I now found the OK too much to handle in strong winds, and capsizes hard to recover from, so I began to stay put and leave the regattas to the spouse. Things were closing in, the years of playing about on the hill or the water were finished, it was growing-up time and felt desolate.

Maybe  as a result of a particularly brisk wind at Helensburgh regatta and a lot of capsizing (which convinced me that I needed to stop sailing), or maybe because it’s quite a common thing to happen, I had a miscarriage and spent a number of days in bed at the in-laws’ house miscarrying into a Heinz Beans tin and emptying it periodically into the far-off loo.

At the next weekend, the spouse went to South Queensferry regatta to sail with his ex-girlfriend Samantha, whom he’d not married (he told me) because she had too many accidents and was thus unfit to rear children. It was a curious coincidence that after she’d taken up with a different boyfriend she stopped having accidents. How interesting.

Anyway, there I was, on a sunny Saturday, feeling weak as a kitten, minding the shop down at Newhaven and beginning to think that I wanted no part of Growing Up, and perhaps the time had come to admit that this was a way of life that I wasn’t fitted for, and I’d better get out while I still could.

When who should appear but Tommy, last seen in the bar of the Kingshouse in Glencoe telling me I couldn't marry Joe McCash; “You’re looking a bit miserable,” he said. So I told him the story and he said “I’m away to Glencoe with my sister and her husband and the girlfriend, do you want to come?” Shakily I packed the old rucksack, closed the shop, and went off with my old friend to stay in my old tent at the foot of that old playground, the Buachaille. The girlfriend wore spectacularly bright horizontally striped knee-socks and seemed disgruntled – she’d probably been expecting a weekend alone with Tommy.

Sleepless with happiness I lay and listened to the sounds of the river flowing past and presently the rain pattering on the tent, and intermittent squeaks of “Get OFF!” from nearby. Not, I thought, from the sister’s tent.

Next day, we went west into Ardnamurchan and lost the rain, and Tommy hurled off his clothes and dived into the sea, as happy as could be, while the striped kneesocks lay on its back refusing to watch him, and sulked. Which didn’t bother him at all.

And so, with that brief sating of nostalgic craving, the crisis passed.

Pitt Street, Kay in pram

Presently we moved into a shop at the foot of Pitt (now Dundas) Street, with not only a basement but also a sub-basement, way down where the big rats lived and where we thought we too could live, relieving the in-laws of our presence, for by now we had our first child, Kay, who slept in the double-sleeping-bag with us for protection from the rats. To get to the loo in the night one had to negotiate the eerie rooms of the sub-basement by torchlight which reflected the baleful red eyes of the indigenous inhabitants. Aarggh.

I suggested to the spouse that we might block the obvious big hole in the skirting of the room where we slept (it was hardly a bedroom) but he said it was better to leave it open, because that way we knew where the rats would come out; if we blocked it they would just make another hole, and we wouldn’t know where that was. I could see the logic of this, especially when he said that his father had wide knowledge of the ways of the rat, that the rats travelled freely through all the sub-basements of Edinburgh and could never be blocked.

The next night there was a tremendous amount of squealing from the hole.

-               - What’s that?

-               -  Mr Rat, of course

-               -  But why is he squealing like that?

-               - That’s the young rat. The old rat nips his tail to make him go through the hole first, in case someone’s waiting to kill him

-               -  Mm. Clever Mr Rat

Through the window, down there in the fiefdom of Mr Rat, could be seen the feet of passing pedestrians, and a tiny bit of sky, way high up. It was scarcely the best ambience for a tiny child.

Just round the corner, a top floor flat came up for sale for £1,200 (£300,000 – £400,000 now, I guess) and before long we were living at an altitude that for Mr Rat was probably the Death Zone – at any rate we seemed to have shaken him off. The flat had rooms so huge that my sister said the whole of her house floor plan would have fitted into our dining-room. Only the pram did not share our satisfaction: he was big and heavy and didn’t want to go up and down three flights of stairs. I used to take Kay up first, tie her to the railings, go down, lug the pram up, unlock the door, bring Kay and the pram indoors – and reverse the process for going down. Nowadays, Health and Safety would probably raise their eyebrows.

But to return to the rise and fall of the Boat Shop. Helping in the shop had become difficult, especially when the second child, Cee, arrived; and when the spouse decided that he needed to expand I could hardly argue, although by now he was employing a secretary and a book-keeper, their pay took precedence over our own, and I couldn’t see where the finance for expansion was to come from.

Economics and money are beyond my comprehension. Why must growth and expansion go on after a certain point? Surely to think one must go on growing is the thinking of a cancer? And, because a cancer ultimately kills the organism it is lodged in, it’s a thing whose unwitting purpose is its own extinction.

Long ago I’d been gripped by a photo of a lad on a station platform waiting for the train to Snowdonia; on his back was everything he needed, and though tilted forward slightly to counterbalance the weight, he carried it easily and looked happy. This, I realised, was what I wanted: to travel light, accumulate the bare minimum and resist any unnecessary extra.

A business that had to keep on growing seemed to me to be set on self-destruction, but I didn’t know enough, and wasn’t contributing enough, to make any serious objection, and on we went, expanding in various directions that seemed only to be ridding ourselves of profit without making any return.

There came a time when suppliers had to be paid, and where was the money to come from? By selling the flat, of course, for house prices were rising. Where to live? We bought a caravan, towed it to a hillside not far from the airport, stashed all our furniture on the paving down by the double basement of the shop, and hoped it wouldn’t rain. The secretary looked at it and said the best thing to do with all that bruck would be to douse it with petrol and set fire to it.

The crisis passed and we managed to find another house, down in Trinity, looking out over the Forth. But before very long the suppliers ran out of patience and the Boat Shop folded. Not long afterwards I produced our third and last child, Em.

Our meals became monotonous: roast potato with mashed potato, boiled potato with turnip. My teeth began to fall out. When the day came that I spent our last few pence on a big turnip which turned out to be riddled with worms, I decided that since my qualifications would probably get me a job, I must become a teacher again. A temporary post at a posh school was offered; I took it, and went on looking for something permanent.

Stromness, Orkney, was advertised. I went up there for an interview and got the job. We had a week to sell the house; the spouse’s father was decorating the walls with the thinnest conceivable layer of magnolia emulsion even while the people were looking around.

Our belongings, including the caravan, went on board the St Rognvald at Leith, followed by ourselves. We were fed an enormous meal of salt beef and beetroot, Em being particularly taken with the beetroot, and then went to our cabin where, since there were only four berths, I lay on my back, clasping Em tightly on top of me. It was too much trouble to remove my white polo-neck pullover and trousers.

In the middle of the night it became stormy as we crossed the Pentland Firth in a gale, and Em tipped her partially-digested beetroot over my white polo-neck pullover, where it festered for the three days it took for our luggage to be brought from Kirkwall to Stromness.

Thus began a new and exceptionally interesting life, copying the lad in the iconic photo by carrying only what I stood up in, but covered in bright purple vomit.  

Attack of the Earworms

The placard that hung above our heads on the bedroom wall urged us:

Any educationist can tell you what happens when you tell someone NOT to do something: the NOT is edited out automatically by a special bit of the human brain that evolved there a long time ago, possibly in response to the Ten Commandments, most likely even earlier. So the transmuted message was what reached us throughout our formative years; by the time we left home it had had many years to sink in.

Luckily for my sister and me, the message hung behind our beds, so that we only glimpsed it in passing; but it probably gripped my mother’s attention as she did all that cleaning and dusting stuff that used to happen in the olden days, and she was by nature a worrier to start with. Far into the night we could hear through the wall my mother’s voice worrying incessantly. About what? We couldn’t hear the words, only the tone. And in the pauses which were signalled by a questioning rise in tone we could hear a reassuring response that my father had become able to make even while deeply asleep.

These two voices are so deeply lodged in my memory that they have become earworms, liable to stir and emerge from their burrows in times of stress, and when they emerge they come not simply as tones of voice but with actual words. 

on the way up Ben Macdui

There was a day, for instance, the last day of my holiday, when I felt a need to knock off Ben Macdui before returning to the flat lands of Oxford. From Glenclova Hostel I cycled the 60 or so miles to Inverey, where the hostel was listed as having food, so I didn’t stop in Braemar to pick up provisions. It turned out that in practice Inverey Hostel had no food and no warden, and by then it was too late to go back to Braemar.

Rummaging in the saddlebag I found a wee cache of dried apple flakes and some glucose tablets; that would have to do. Some apple flakes in hot water (pumped up from the well, beautiful water, no chlorine) for supper and off to bed.

Ben Macdui summit cairn

This was the first time I’d been in the Cairngorms so I started up the track to Derry Lodge, carried on part way through the Lairig Ghru, up by the March Burn, over the summit plateau of Macdui (4295ft) in thick mist (aarrgh, was that the dreaded Fear Liath Mòr (Big Grey Man) up ahead at the top? no, only the summit cairn, phew), down the other side, past Loch Etchachan, down Glen Derry. It’s a reasonably long walk, and a fair climb to the top of Macdui, and I was really pretty hungry in spite of chewing the remainder of the apple flakes en route, but still it was a surprise when I fell over on the way down Glen Derry. A glucose tablet, and the legs started whirring again, but not for long, down again, another glucose.

Presently the attack of the earworms started. It began with my mother’s voice, “Oh dear, you’ll never manage,” which triggered another topple to the peat and another glucose; oh dearie me, I found myself thinking, I’ll never manage, I’m going to just lie here and rot away, and turn into whitening bones … In came my father’s voice, “You can do it, get up, you’ll be all right,” and up I got and carried on … until here came the song of the mother worm again, “Oh dear …”

Oxford

The alternating worms kept up their songs until the glucose and the father worm got me back to Inverey, on to the bike, along to Braemar, where the hostel had great wads of food, for by this time rationing was easing. I got bacon and bread and kippers and a tin of spaghetti, and fried them all together in a massive great pan, a potent nosh to remember on the long train journey back down to the flat lands and spires of Oxford.

Not far away, in Abingdon, lived my sister Joan; in the more than 80 years that I knew her, I never fathomed what made her tick, but I have clear memories of her expertise at coping with the minutiae of daily living. Back when we shared the bedroom of

W O R R Y

I T   M A Y   H A P P E N

our school uniform consisted of white blouse, navy tunic, long black stockings and sensible shoes; under the blouse was a device known as a liberty bodice, whose job was to hold up the stockings via four suspenders: it gave the enclosed body liberty in contrast to the full whale-boned corset which preceded it, and in due course it would be overtaken by the suspender-belt, which was what was left of a liberty bodice if you cut it in half and took away the top bit; for the liberty-bodice was a substantial garment with shoulder-straps, which went over the vest and descended to the bum, and on its lower rim were the suspenders that held up the long black stockings; over this lot went the knickers - vast, navy school knickers with a pocket for your hankie during gym. Putting all this on early in the freezing morning was neither easy nor quick, and especially slow was the careful fastening of the stockings to the suspenders so that the seams would not become grotesquely twisted.

liberty bodice

So, faced with this routine challenge, which continued for six school years, Joan evolved a time-and-stress-saving strategy: having once got the stockings suspended at exactly the right position and height, she thereafter left the whole lot fastened, crawling neatly out of the apparatus at the end of the school day, and leaping aboard it with scarcely credible agility in the morning; during the night it hung on a coat-hanger from a hook in the door, its off-white body and dangling dark legs a startling vision in the moonlight for a sister sharing the bedroom and half-waking from the fantasy of a dream.

Abingdon

After school and university, came our first jobs: Joan was living in Abingdon and working at Harwell; I was in Oxford, proof-reading at the OUP and had a bedsit on the Iffley Road. When I first went there, the landlady, Ivy, showed me my room, lined with a wallpaper whose pattern was huge, dark, ominous leaves, and told me “I call this my Autumn Room, it’s where my husband went mad.” Joan’s first digs were with a family who drew the curtains when the sun shone “because it puts the fire out”, and threw a wobbly if she happened to lay down her knife and fork crossing one another (no reason given, possibly because too horrific to speak about).

On a Sunday my landlady would cook a wondrous lunch of roast beef and yorkshire pud, splendid, but far too huge for me with a stomach shrunk by a decade of rationing. It seemed a brilliant idea to share it with another shrunken stomach, and accordingly Joan cycled across from Abingdon one Sunday, and we split the massive Sunday lunch before going out on our bikes. But this upset Ivy who raged that she’d cooked it for me, not for my sister. It was a time when you absolutely did not argue with the diktat, no matter how grotesque, of your landlady - you might as well argue with a spitting cobra; so next Sunday Joan cycled across and crouched outside the window of my room while I passed out half the fodder. We totally escaped detection.

Eventually I moved to a different bedsit, where the landlady believed that her dead uncle came in the night and told her which horse to back on the morrow. “Hark!” she would cry, “I can hear him tap-tap-tapping at the window, he’ll have the winner for the 2.15”, and she would hurry to open the window while I crept away upstairs. She had a stomach ulcer, and during the day she puked into a bucket which she kept to show me as soon as I got in the door after work. I stayed out later and later, pacing the streets and admiring the amazing Oxford architecture, while the mother earworm lamented.

Presently I moved again, to live with Torquil and Sheila and their small daughter, all of whom were sane. Torquil had been a prisoner-of war for several years; when asked how bad that had been he was dismissive: "it wasn't very nice, but nothing like as bad as Eton". Torquil’s mother was an aristocrat, who disapproved of his marriage to a commoner (and of him giving house-room to common lodgers) and would pay surprise visits to express that disapproval. When her car was observed approaching, the warning cry went up “Lady Muck!” whereupon everyone had to lie on the floor underneath the windows, invisible to a person peering in from outside, until she gave up and went away.  

Oor Wullie

During these years our mother would send the Sunday Post down to Joan every week. This hugely popular folk-Scots production featured in its middle pages the cartoon adventures of Oor Wullie and The Broons, whose speech was broad Central Belt. Joan took it to Harwell, where there was a considerable contingent of Welshmen who were glad to engage with another non-English culture and got Joan to read aloud and explain the speech-bubbles of the characters. I pictured the cluster of Welshmen in one of the most hi-tech ambiences of the time, listening to Joan’s best native accent “Jings, whit a rammy in Peasy’s Alley” and her translation of jings and rammy.

Joan got engaged (“oh dear”) and our parents travelled down for the wedding. On the eve of which my mother got hold of her and spent many hours urging her to cancel it (“it’s not too late to change your mind”); it was an obvious effort for Joan to make it, pale and shaking, through the proceedings the next day, but luckily my mother was neutralised by the bridegroom’s mother, who gripped her arm and poured into her ear the long, long saga of all her only son’s childhood ailments.

the ascendancy

The flat lands were pleasant enough, if you liked that sort of thing, and they suited Joan. But they were ruled by the ascendancy, fine people in their way but used to a degree of inequality that one hardly saw at all in the north. I had long since become thirled to a starker landscape, and the need to return to it became stronger with the years. So I left Oxford and during the long train journey north, two men got in, somewhere around the Borders, and fell into conversation (not done in England), and what they discussed with one another was Theology (not a thing you would speak about in England).

a starker landscape

Yes, here was a culture I could understand. In the early light of dawn, bare, steep hillsides rolled past outside the window, and clouds wheeched briskly across the sky, growing dark from time to time with a blatter of rain. It would be cold out there.

This was where I needed to be.