You don’t have to be mad to live on an island — but it helps!
ISLANDER: A JOURNEY AROUND OUR ARCHIPELAGO by Patrick Barkham (Granta £20)
BEING British, we are all islanders, whether we realise it or not.
I realised it one day when I was in austria on holiday, and I thought, with a ferocity that surprises me still: ‘Where’s the sea?’
Several hundred miles in every direction, it turned out. and I can’t really explain it, but I felt ridiculously claustrophobic all of a sudden, in the magnificent, wide-open spaces and blissful fresh air of the austrian countryside. Where’s the sea?
From large islands, of course, it’s just a small step to small islands, and from there, to islands that are barely more than large rocks poking out of the ocean.
Nature writer Patrick Barkham has taken this path before with his splendid book Coastlines, which dipped its toe in island life while concentrating on the beaches, cliffs and harbours of the British mainland.
this book is pretty much what it says on the tin: it explores 11 British islands, of hugely varying sizes, populations and histories, and discovers that for every sort of person, there’s an island somewhere that will suit you.
I think mine would have to have a pub and a second-hand bookshop, so it’s probably one of the larger ones for me.
Barkham, a lovely, fluid writer, takes his lead from a short story he once read by D. h. Lawrence about a man who keeps buying islands and eventually drives himself mad.
this story, it turns out, was about Compton Mackenzie, author of Whisky Galore and roughly 100 other now unread books, who moved from island to island, searching for something he probably never found.
Barkham visits Barra, the hebridean island where Mackenzie lived for a decade in the twenties, and Mackenzie’s story, which is both hilarious and oddly tragic, provides an entertaining counterpoint throughout the book to Barkham’s own.
the essence of the book, though, is the deep eccentricity of all the people Barkham meets along the way. On the Isle of Man, now an agile, sharp-eyed home to financial services experts, the old islanders still venerate hares. a few years after the war, a woman went to a fish shop and bought a hare. Later, she showed it to an old Manxwoman who said: ‘You’d never catch me eating my own grandmother.’
Barkham, not surprisingly, is fascinated by the fauna and the flora he finds on these places. Small islands, he says, are ‘vivid laboratories for the study of evolution’. Darwin discovered his many and hugely varied finches on the Galapagos Islands.
On St Kilda, there are supersized wrens; on Soay, there are tiny sheep. Madagascar has the smallest chameleon on the planet,
and until recently, St Helena had a three-inch-long earwig.
Everyone he meets seems to work incessantly, because these are, in the main, hard lives. And they have long memories. ‘you can’t really have a present without a past here,’ says a Barra resident.
Writers crop up with remarkable frequency. ‘Life on a small island restores human dignity,’ wrote Mackenzie. ‘The individual is not overwhelmed by his own unimportance.’
Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie and George Orwell all lived in the Hebrides at one time or another.
On Eigg, everyone waves at everyone else. Every car ‘looks decrepit and sounds sick, emitting gravelly bass notes, wheezes and death rattles’.
On one island, Barkham hears birdsong he doesn’t recognise, and it turns out to be a corncrake, once plentiful, now as rare as rubies. The RSPB is hoping to entice corncrakes back to Rathlin, off the northern Irish coast. One landed in 2014 and spent ten days there, calling for a mate who never came. ‘Then some yuppies came in a helicopter and more or less landed on the bird’s head,’ says the warden. ‘We never heard from him again.’
And Barkham has a wonderful eye for detail. In the midst of telling us the terrible tale of Alderney in the Channel Islands, which its inhabitants voted to abandon en masse at the beginning of World War II, with just an hour to pack one suitcase each, he has room to give us a list of the wild flowers that grow on the clifftops in summer: ‘ Thrift, squill, prostrate broom, Portland spurge, Alderney cranesbill, bastard toadflax.’
This is poetry, of a type. I’d like a bouquet of Portland spurge, please, and throw in some bastard toadflax while you’re about it.