DURING MY YEARS in the Central Belt, I discovered there was no greater innocent abroad than the city-dweller listening to tales about life in the islands.
Working in a city centre office, I would amuse myself by providing my colleagues with all sorts of little legends and stories – that our TV was fuelled by a gas canister and one had to light a fuse before settling down to watch the night’s entertainment; that the average Free Church sermon lasted for six long, pandrop-sooking hours on a Sunday (and four hours mid-week when barley sugars were provided); that gangs of kirk elders roamed the village looking to berate any young woman who slipped on a pair of jeans; that the Gaelic term for a dungaree-clad man who scattered seaweed on crops was a ‘feminist’ (this legend was based on the fact that the Gaelic translation for ‘seaweed’ was a word with a similar sound, feamainn). As these tales continued, the greater the gap between their lips grew. They gaped as they swallowed every story, never inclined to treat my words with any grain of scepticism, the slightest morsel of doubt…
In doing this, I was following in a long Highland and Hebridean tradition – one of feeding and fuelling the gullibility of visitors. When Martin Martin visited St Kilda at the end of the 17th century, locals would point one of their prehensile toes in the direction of a ledge of rock jutting out into clear sky and say; ‘That’s where the young men have to stand on their tip-toes before they’re allowed to get married. It’s a way of proving that they can look after a wife and offspring when that time comes.’ The young mainlander would nod sagely when this – and so much else – was said to him, never considering that the words might be in jest.
This phenomenon – the unwillingness to question what is said about the islands, the acceptance that whatever the locals might tell a visitor is gospel, still exists today. This has generated all sorts of legends about these parts of our periphery. Centuries ago, for instance, a writer travelled to my native parish of Ness and discovered that the worship of the sea-god, Shonnie, was still going on; a few of the local lads even wading into the ocean to baptise the waves with a flagon of ale to convince him of this fact. More recently, one respected Scottish journalist made a similar pilgrimage. He ended up in a local pub with a couple of bachelors who informed him of their difficulties in obtaining girlfriends because of the shortage of young women in the district. One of them added to the story by supplying their visitor the information that the district had the highest percentage of blow-up dolls in the country. That particular burst of suppressed and pumped air made its way into the pages of a quality newspaper.
Many of these stories cluster around drink and religion. The power and might of the church is often exaggerated in tales of the periphery. So likewise are legends of the gallons of drink the natives consume. Also prevalent is the cartoon-like figure of the easy-going crofter, only too content to idle out his days with his hands firmly fixed in his pockets. If I had a penny for every time I heard someone from the Central Belt come out with the tired joke about whether Gaels had a word like mañana tucked away in their vocabulary, I would be able to walk up the village road with a loud jingle accompanying my every movement – unlike someone of my father’s ilk, whose ‘sense of urgency’ often saw him going out to work in the peats or down the croft after completing a day’s employment.
Then there is the other extreme, the mythologising of people from places like the Hebrides. It is sometimes hard to walk down the street in, say, Tarbert, Harris, without encountering someone who, in a sentimental book about the Tweed industry, has not been described as a ‘Celtic goddess’, the writer having been in raptures about her ‘twinkling eyes’ and ‘the lilt of her voice’. One can see this tendency in the 19th century song collector Alexander Carmichael’s boast that he had ‘kissed a St Kildan lass’. When the reader discovers that she was ‘a little beauty with dark brown eyes and fresh complexion about 10 or 11 years’, one’s suspicions about the reasons for regarding her in such ideal terms are fully reinforced. Some visitors – both in the past and present – view the people they come across in the Hebrides as being unlike their urban counterparts, unspoiled and magical, innocent children of Nature rather than marred and affected by the problems of – what they perceive as – ‘civilisation’. Carmichael’s behaviour shows this unfortunate tendency to mythologise people at its absolute and unhealthiest extreme, personified in the young girl he wishes to kiss. Transformed by the landscape they inhabit, the people these travellers come across have also become ‘sublime’.
Underlying all these stories is a series of inaccurate stereotypes. They feature the clash between ancient and modern, cynicism and ‘knowledge and an idealised innocence’, simple and complex, past and present. This is the language of colonialism, where the visitors are always sharp and innovative while the residents are mired in their own backwardness. This attitude is best illustrated by the words of the one of England’s most well-known travellers around the wilds of Scotland, the legendary figure of Dr Samuel Johnson. He apparently declared that ‘the poetry of St Kilda must be very poor,’ as the island had ‘so very few images’. No doubt he would have been surprised by the work of such writers as Ted Hughes or Gerard Manley Hopkins, even the nursery rhyme ‘Who killed Cock Robin’.
One suspects that many of these legends are down to a simple misunderstanding of the nature of the natives by visitors to the North. They seem to believe that because islanders talk slowly, they must also think slowly. However, a little thought and consideration might reveal why so many in the north-west speak in this slow, patient way. The English language has only been familiar to them for one or two generations. With every word a potential man-trap, they speak it with great accuracy and care. One can see this legacy in writers such as Iain Crichton Smith, Norman MacCaig and George Mackay Brown. Each of them had a Gaelic-speaking mother. These women would have – at least in their early years – made their way tentatively through the difficulties of a new language, forced to weigh up the worth and value of each word. It was a skill their sons inherited – as well as, too, that other part of their Gaelic inheritance; a relish for a well-told and crafted tale.
There was, some 80 years ago, one particular island where this tendency was very clearly seen, where ‘tale-telling’, like mythology, was commonplace. This is St Kilda – the island at Scotland’s furthest edge. Stories and songs, often told around the fireside, bound the community together. It was within this tradition in St Kilda that the ‘deadpan look’ which fooled Martin Martin and so many other visitors to its shores was masterfully developed. No doubt a few ‘shaggy dog’ (or ‘shaggy cormorant’) stories were told to both guest and islander alike. All in all, these perpetrated a number of myths about the island that are still stored away today. These include the legends that involve the various stones around the island, the Amazon’s House with its formidable female resident and the saga of the Parliament where the men gathered to discuss and debate what they planned to do that day. (There was one of these in our village on Lewis too, which met and quarrelled on occasion. We gave it the considerably less grandiose title of the Grazings Committee).
There were also, of course, the legions of seabirds which flew around the cliffs and skerries. People ate them too in Lewis, South Uist, Islay and Tiree – the gannet, puffin, guillemot, shag, whatever they could get their talons on. At that time and even for decades afterwards, there was nothing special about the diet of the St Kildan. It was common throughout the north. Even today, it might be possible to pick up a puffin or guzzle guga in Reykjavik or Tórshavn. The only exception to that is the blessed bird, the fulmar which, until relatively recently, only nested on its shores.
Even now, when the island is long empty, people continue to project their fantasies on the vacant buildings of Main Street, the cliffs of Conachair. Chief among these ideas is the myth that St Kilda (or Hiort, its Gaelic name) was a socialist utopia until civilisation – and the church specifically – came to ruin it. They point out, for instance, that unlike Foula in Shetland which had a more ‘free enterprise’ and individualistic society where each household had its own section of ‘cliff-face’ and were allowed to gather their birds only from there, the men of St Kilda had a greater sense of community, harvesting sea-fowl for all who lived upon the island and sharing the catch out according to people’s needs and requirements. For all that writers idealise this tradition, it seems to me that there must always have been tensions and small resentments between the individuals involved in these labours. I have taken part in enough tasks like the gathering of peats or the harvesting of potatoes to be aware that there will always be muttered comments directed at those who are seen not to be pulling their weight.
The Free Church is certainly seen as the villain in many of these pantomime stories; a mention of its name elicits a chorus of hisses and boos from modern commentators, many believing that it destroyed the beautiful society which was in place before its arrival. The Glasgow Herald writer, Robert Connell, writes rather nostalgically and unrealistically of the ‘good old days of cake and ale, before the Disruption, when whistling was not yet a sin, and when fiddling and piping, and even dancing, were not unknown in St Kilda’. The modern writers, Tom Steel and Charles Maclean, go further in this view. Steel argues that the islanders were ‘a simple, credulous people’ who were ‘made slaves’ by ‘the stern faith of the Free Church’. Charles Maclean believes that as a result of the Talibanesque activities of the Free Church and the arrival of the missionary Macdonald of Ferintosh in 1822, what ‘little culture the St Kildans possessed… had long since died’.
Life is rarely that simple. There is an alternative view, one which claims that among all the visitors who came to Village Bay, missionaries and preachers were the only ones who ever placed any value on the humans who lived on the island. Instead of seeing them as misfits whose presence marred the magnificent landscape – the Glasgow Herald journalist Connell mocked one woman for possessing ‘ankles like a rhinoceros’ and for walking ‘like that interesting but inelegant creature’ too. Visitors described them as ‘wingless bipeds’, their singing resembling ‘a pack of hyenas’. They were ‘elephant-ankled, fishy-smelling bipeds’ (‘St Kilda and the Sublime’, Fraser MacDonald) that Victorian travellers skirted around in Main Street. Missionaries, on the other hand, saw them as souls to be saved, people who had to be given the opportunity to find the right path to salvation. On an island mired in poverty, where so many were lost in their early years, it could be argued that the church, far from destroying the community, did much to sustain it. It offered the people of the island an alternative set of values, a way of asserting their own self-esteem, especially when they measured their own lack of material success against those wealthy visitors who paraded around Village Bay in the summer months (peculiarly, when they examined their lack of spiritual wealth, the St Kildans often felt sorry for them). It was valuable, too, as a source of strength when they lost children in infancy or were forced to deal with the results of a stumble or fall from the cliffs. Rightly or wrongly, it granted them the hope that they would meet with their loved ones once again in Heaven, restoring the family bond that had been broken on this earth.
There are more myths. In the opening pages of a recent novel about St Kilda, a young minister’s wife is attacked by a flock of skuas soon after she lands in Village Bay, causing her to lose her unborn child. As this occurred in the 1830s, this is about as likely as a Concorde sweeping down over the heads of the characters in a Dickens novel. The skua (or bonxie as it is known in the far north) only started nesting in the Hebrides at roughly the same time that the steel bird took wing, during the 1970s. This cannot be deemed a mere detail: the appearance of these birds in the book shows a fundamental misunderstanding of life on the island. In any case, what the people of Village Bay would have done if ever a piratical bird arrived in the vicinity of Conachair (a rival for their harvest of puffins, fulmar and petrels) was destroy their eggs; the birds killed. None of the false sentimentality that inspired aristocracy like the Lairds of Unst, the Edmonston family who strove to protect the existence of the skua, would ever have perched or nested for a moment in the island far to the west.
And so to this book, which I have put together with my friend, artist Doug Robertson, who, for all his origins on Scotland’s east coast, now lives in the far south-east of England. Despite the distance between us, there is little doubt that our imaginations spark off one another, often as if we were occupying the same small room. There are times when we make suggestions to each other, improving and sharpening our original ideas. His drawings help me to develop my own ideas, and there is little doubt that my writings do much the same for him. There are occasions when we draw on truths to generate and create our art-work. The last sermons attended by the St Kildans, for example, inspired both Doug’s drawings and my writing. The importance of stone in the life of all islanders has also provided inspiration; these include the cairns erected on cliff-tops for generations by those who dwell upon their shores, providing men with landmarks, making particular headlands look distinctive when they fish near an island’s coast. On a larger, spiritual scale, they even include Callanish and the monolithic Clach an Truiseal on my native isle.
The Guga Stone takes place in the head of Calum Mackinnon, an islander who has been sent to guard the islanders’ property in the years after their departure. There is truth in this. The St Kildans’ homes were indeed vandalised a short time after their belongings had been mainly cleared and doors closed. Someone was sent back to Main Street in a bid to protect the assets they had left behind. Mackinnon’s thoughts veer back and forth as he contemplates various aspects of life in Village Bay and its surroundings. He remembers the departure, the flight and patterns of birds, mainland visitors, the origins of its people and its myths and landmarks. He even (much less realistically) considers the Second World War with its plane crashes, the new life that will come to the island’s shoreline with its Rocket Range, how the natives of St Kilda will survive in their exile as they live out their days on the mainland, how a new generation of visitors – such as the incoming archaeologists, botanists and ornithologists – will adjust to life in a newly refurbished Main Street after decades of these houses standing empty.
Mad? Bonkers? Fictitious? Undoubtedly. Yet, nevertheless, I would argue that there is a kind of truth in the pages that follow. It belongs to the world which the St Kildans and other islanders inhabited, where there was poetry, story, legend and seabirds all around. Mostly, however, it incorporates the spirit of winding up the visitor that was prevalent for centuries in the mind of both the Highlander and Islander – for all that they may or may not have mentioned such phenomena as the existence of the clockwork fulmar or the St Kildan goth movement in their tales.
Read the following pages. Work out for yourself what is – and is not – to be believed.
Donald S. Murray
June 2013