I arrived in Shetland for the first time in the middle of winter, with the island in a frenzy of mud, oil and construction activity. It was 1978, and the biggest oil terminal in Europe was being carved out of peat and rock by some 10,000 travelling workers, housed in two giant camps, at Firth and Toft. It was a black gold klondyke, with fortunes being made and lost, unskilled labourers earning up to £1000 a week, and I was sent to write about it.
The very sociable culture of the island, the reality of its difference from the mainland, hit me first on the ferry north. I had been meant to fly; in fact I’d started out from Glasgow Airport, but the old Viscount hit turbulence on the way north and was forced to make a lumbering landing at Inverness. We were bussed to Aberdeen and told to expect 14 hours on the P&O boat St Clair.
“She’s only operating on one engine at the moment,” I was told. Really? How long does it take with two engines?
“Fourteen hours. Aye, boy. We’ll hae a peerie foy. Whit aboot a dram?”
The man, middle-aged, rosy-nosed, was wearing a Fair Isle sweater (known locally as a gansie, as in ‘Guernsey’) in an eye-watering electric blue. I never knew his name. Only that he was a fisherman, his boat was in Peterhead, and he was heading home for a wedding. “Three nights, a muckle foy in Whalsay.” It would be years before I learned that the tiny island of Whalsay was home to many millionaires, due to the preponderance of gigantic pelagic uber-trawlers. Whalsay is famous for its wonderful golf course, and the best charity shop in the history of the world.
Through a force eight gale we wallowed, plunged and slammed. And ate. And drank. Unified by our dodgy flight and undulating bus trip, we former flyers were given food and drink vouchers, which we spent on enormous North Sea steaks, chips, beer and Stewart’s Rum, my first encounter with this strangely settling black spirit.
I don’t remember feeling sick. I remember the darkness, and the metallic-taste of bad beer. Drybroughs Heavy – “the heavy that’s Scotland’s own”, according to a popular ad of the time. The smoking indoors, because everyone smoked: Golden Virginia, Samson or Duma roll-ups. And the sweet, comforting fire of that blackest of rums.
“I dis dy first time in da nort isles?”
Yes, I must have replied.
“No dy last, boy, no dy last.”
Somebody had a fiddle, and played, I remember thinking, astonishingly well considering the shifting, clanking mountain of tins beside his chained-down chair. I woke to a darkness that over the course of the morning, never quite lifted beyond a murky twilight. Lerwick glowered, stoney, towny, glum. I hired a Mini and drove north into traffic jams of huge Russian earthmoving trucks. Night fell again around 2PM, by which time I was in a quarry near Brae, talking to the Liverpudlian manager, who seemed completely enthused by his exile to a battered portable accommodation unit in the far north of what seemed like nowhere.
“My first week, in the summer, I was asked to a party, and they spit-roasted a sheep, mate, at midnight. Sociable? I’ve never been anywhere as sociable as this. And I’m from Liverpool, lad. Fancy a beer?”
And so it went on. Cups of strong, sweet, Rayburn-stewed-for-hours tea, my first bannock and the savoury blast of tattie soup. And the sense that visitors were both expected and welcome; that your presence was never an imposition. Shipwreck, fishing and harbour culture, where the sea brings company that may or may not remain forever. Where the return from a voyage is something to be greeted with joy, relief – and a celebration.
Nine years passed. Shetland haunted me, hunted me through citybound dreams, never nightmares. A place of welcome. A place without judgement.
“There’s no key,” Susan said on the telephone (landline, of course; this was when mobiles were the size of briefcases). “Nobody locks their doors. Just go in and make yourself at home.” We had met at a gig in Glasgow; Susan was a doctor visiting from the far-flung Shetland islands.
“Ah, The Shetlands,” I said. “I’ve been there!”
“If you had, you’d know it’s never ‘The Shetlands’,” came the brusque reply. “It’s Shetland, singular.” By this time a BBC producer in religious affairs, I invented an excuse for a ‘recce’. This was early autumn, often the most beautiful of Shetland seasons: hairst, when long, dry, still periods of weather combine with the ‘steekit stumba’ (heavy mist) to provide a full moon of such surpassing pinkness it could grace a Nick Drake album cover.
And, of course, Susan and I fell in love in Shetland. There were peerie and muckle foys all week long, often at the BBC’s expense. The joint of seaweed-fed Foula mutton, procured from some mysterious source on the ultra-bohemian west side of the principal Shetland island (known as the Mainland). Never had I tasted such meat, from the small, hardy, pure Shetland sheep, pungent and herbal with nothing added in the cooking save heat. The long journey to the mysterious outpost known as Burrastow House, where, in an oak-panelled, peat-firelit room, we plucked pearls from local mussels, ate roast hare shot by the owner, Harry Tuckey, served with Shetland black tatties and kale. Gatherings in Susan’s gigantic house (rented from the Health Board for £12 a week). A hall dance, somewhere (even now I’d better not say exactly where). Several hundred people, a fleet of Citroën 2CVs outside, with someone bouncing on the canvas roofs. Soup, bannocks, cakes, mutton, cold, now, and if not as magical as the Foula roast, succulent and tender, and perfect for soaking up the rum... Dancing and dancing and dancing. What seemed like the best band in the world. Boston Two-Steps to a rock‘n’roll tune; was it Deep Purple’s ‘Black Night’?
“Is dis dy first time in Shetland? Weel, it’ll no be dy last, boy. No dy last.”
And it wasn’t.
Shetland is my escape. I work in Glasgow as a doctor, a lot. As time becomes shorter and I see a more rigid routine stretched ahead, I find solace in returning home. I can go there and claim to be uncontactable, even if I am not, and I can escalate to off-grid if I so choose. When I’m overwhelmed by over-commitment or by my disorganisation, I can step back into a place of peace and family. I can imagine, at least, that I’m back at South House – the little red house with the plastic conservatory and the Singer sewing machine that looks over the beach and across the water of Ronas Voe to the steep slopes of Shetland’s highest hill. This is where I grew up.
Marked on crude maps from the sixteenth century, South House is a tiny stone croft that sits on a bed of radon-emitting red granite on the side of a hill above the sea. The house stands at the end of a single track road, about 35 miles north of the main town of Lerwick. Heylor, the collection of about five houses including ours, used to be a vibrant fishing community, the ruins and remnants of which can still be seen. Most of Shetland is an unexcavated archeological treasure-trove, and Heylor is no exception.
Heylor sits above the Blade – a cleaver-shaped beach of sand and pebble that’s deserted 99 per cent of the time. As children, this was our playground: the old, mussel-encrusted stone pier with steps from which we could jump into the wet sand at low tide. At high tide, we’d use it to launch the boat, or build dams to block the various crevices that formed as the water rushed in. The beach is home to nesting Tirricks (Arctic Terns) during early summer and therefore off limits: venturing close to their nests of shells meant certain injury, nay death, from the divebombing bastards.
Between the house and the beach lived the pigs. At 5 or 6 years old I remember my bewilderment at Mum and Dad’s attempts at self-sufficiency. This might have been down to their general incompetence: the attempts to rear the pigs for pork only ever resulted in a fondness and eventual bond. The pigs were then kept as pets until they died of old age. Not a pork chop nor strip of bacon passed my lips, and my mother still refuses to eat white meat because it reminds her of dear old Derek.
We kept geese, but they just destroyed the garden before escaping using their only partially clipped wings or being killed by the local Bonxie (Great Skua). Another batch actually made it to the dinner table, but they were so tough from their old age and sea-breeze hardening as to be inedible. The chickens were a little more successful – they managed to produce eggs to feed the family. But they, too, were gradually picked off. One by one, they succumbed to our mad St Bernards.
Compared with Heylor, Hillswick is positively urban. It has a shop, with petrol pumps. It has a hotel with a bar and restaurant, and a public hall. Like every pillar of civilisation, it has its own galley shed where the local Viking longship lives and would-be Vikings gather to discuss alcohol and axes. And it has a doctor’s surgery, in which my Mum works as the local GP. It has a school, and I was one of only 32 children who attended it. So engrained was the register that I didn’t ever have to check any class photographs.
I watched my mum acting as the single-handed GP, accident and emergency, minor-surgeon and emergency retrieval unit for a population of about 800 people over a vast land area. To me, she’s just Mum. The doctor, the mother. To everyone else on that island, I know she has been much more. Now I’ve grown up a little, I’m almost moved to tears when I think of the influence my mother has had. The respect that she garners from locals whose families had lives saved or ended well and the respect passed on to me. The defiance in the face of threats of closure, resulting in year upon year of 24-hour on-call. Growing up, I was troubled by the constant phone calls to our house from the same one or two patients demanding immediate consultations, and who inevitably had nothing wrong with them. I thought this was not the life I wanted to lead. Now, the community and responsibility is something for which I long.
It was a deeply privileged upbringing – short school days with teachers who had few pupils. The bus would drop me at Gran’s house about 100 yards down the road. Gran would spoil us with Jaffa Cakes and Dairy Milk. In return I’d make the tea – she liked half tea and half milk, she said, though I could never bring myself to commit. We’d sit and watch old videos about trains. Over and over again.
Gran would bake with me. I’m not sure why it was with me above my siblings – my older brother Magnus never seemed interested, and by the time our younger sister Martha could reach the countertop, Gran’s health had started to go downhill. But during those brief, wonderful years, I learned the basics: Scotch pancakes. Crêpes. Apple pie, with pastry made from butter or Stork with lard. Victoria sponge. Lemon meringue pie if I’d been particularly well-behaved.
Thanks to Gran, I grew up with these tools in my arsenal. Whereas Dad came here from afar, and was stunned by its peculiar wondrousness, I grew up encased.