Paraffin by the jug, rope by the yard and a laugh as resonant as the roar of the Hebridean sea

IN the summer of 1977 an intense Swedish tourist stayed on the west side of Lewis and, over the weeks, took a great many photographs. These were neither casual holiday snaps (‘Agnetha and I at the Callanish Stones!’) nor elegant studies of the eerily beautiful Hebridean landscape.

Gösta Sandberg was fascinated by people, their homes and work and daily round. As a result, and wholly unaware of it at the time, his grainy monochrome images document richly an island way of life that has now quite gone.

I was 11 that summer and spent much of our Lewis holiday at the Shawbost home of my widowed grandmother. Many households still had a milk cow and all the village children chatted unselfconsciously in Gaelic.

Almost everyone burned peat, kept in neat long stacks by the house, and the day for most began and ended with family worship – some Scripture read, the singing of a Gaelic psalm.

There were then recently vacated blackhouses, their thatched roofs beginning to decay, and one family still lived in one. I remember helping to gather hay by hand – crofters scything the grass, children positively encouraged to fling the stuff about for better drying in the August sun; the clatter from every other household as a Hattersley loom clacketyclacked through a length of Harris Tweed; and the solemnity when an old lady died in the house across the road.

From that moment till her funeral, all outside work in the village ceased and a scheduled dance was cancelled. All the window blinds in her house were drawn down and we younglings were ordered not to shout or laugh out of doors.

BY like custom, no one worked outside on Wednesday evening, the night of the local prayer meeting. On another day, there was a wedding, and between the bride’s household and the church everyone posted an improvised white flag at their gate for the hour when she would be driven by.

All women over a certain age wore a distinctive headscarf, a beannag, whenever they ventured out; there were still Great War widows in black from head to toe and still a sense of intense community.

If someone killed a sheep, bloody joints were quickly distributed to neighbours. Folk were constantly in and out of one another’s houses – no one ever knocked, they just piled cheerfully in – and came together for such seasonal missions as peat cutting.

When a cow was in milk, recycled whisky bottles of it would be left quietly at your door, rich, raw and still warm from the beast.

Last month there was an exhibition of Gösta Sandberg’s photographs in the old Shawbost school and I spent a wistful hour admiring. But the most powerful – the most wrenching – was of what seemed a nondescript singlestorey building, with nothing to identify its function save big tin signs to the glory of Brooke Bond tea and Wall’s ice cream. And yet, hard by the Shawbost crossroads, it had been central to the community for as long as anyone could remember.

By the Great War it was in service as the local post office. Each evening, folk met outside for the daily government tele- gram, stuck up in the window as in post offices throughout the realm, with the latest news of the war.

But, by my time, it had long been Angus Gillies’s shop, a magical place scented with bacon and kippers and tobacco that sold everything you could think of. Angus – beaming and bespectacled – served everyone in state from behind the great wooden counter.

Paraffin you could buy by the jug; rope by the yard, kept on a vast sort of cotton reel in the ceiling and measured off by the counter. Mr Gillies purveyed tea and bacon and flour and sugar and packets of this and tins of that and, of course, sweets – as well as anything you might need for your chickens, your bicycle or your cow.

Men hung about it all day, discussing events. Women would chat gently as they queued happily for service, and handwritten announcements of sheepdog trials and so on would be taped in the humble emporium’s windows.

In the evenings, it was the social hub of village teenagers, who would gather outside for hours till the time for family worship beckoned. In one window was always displayed a big yellow card with a range of the fanciest penknives a small boy could desire, and which I would study longingly. Looking back, that shop must have been a fearful commitment for Angus Gillies. It certainly never made him rich. He would be in Stornoway every morning at oh-gosh o’clock to fetch from the cash and carry and the shop itself was open 12 hours a day, six days a week.

YET he was happy, and greatly esteemed, and in every house somewhere hung his calendar – courtesy of ‘Angus Gillies, General Merchant, The Gate, Shawbost,’ and as dignified as if it were Selfridges.

And that was a poignant summer, even those golden days of August 1977, for he had passed away in March. His sons kept the shop going, but they had professions and ambitions of their own and could see the way retail winds were blowing. We all sensed the end was near. By New Year 1978 it had closed, as shops like it rapidly folded all over the island and, indeed, everywhere else.

Grocery vans now toured the villages and, as more and more people acquired cars, more and more chose to do a big weekly shop in Stornoway, abetted by such new conveniences as the deep freeze. But my grandmother could no longer waddle daily to the little shop at the crossroads; the old men had no longer a place to gather for a yarn. The shuttered building stood for many more years. Someone made off with the orange Brooke Bond tea sign. Adolescents, into the 1990s, still gathered nightly outside it; girls could be distinctly fresh as I walked nervously by in my teens. At election time, it would be plastered with posters for one party or another.

But all around us a culture was rapidly dissolving. The Free Church remains a force in Shawbost; Gaelic is still widely spoken. But few children are now fluent in it. Almost all the old blackhouses have been flattened. People rarely visit their neighbours; TV has destroyed an old sociability, most women work full time.

Folk are so car-bound these days that you can motor through Shawbost without seeing a soul on foot. When I would walk to church, I sensed I was thought distinctly eccentric.

By 2000, when the old shop was finally demolished, young folk had long since ceased to convene by it. A nasty plastic bus shelter now stands there. No one much under 50 can remember the rope, the penknives or the bacon slicer or the gurgle of Angus Gillies’s laughter, resonant as the roar of the Hebridean sea.