From city strife to became the beating
THE final straw was when the burglar alarm went off one day while Maggie Alexander was collecting her sons from nursery. It was the moment that Maggie and her GP husband, Malcolm, realised they no longer wanted to live in a big city, surrounded by people, noise, pollution and the underlying threat of crime.
“I met Maggie, who was an anaesthetist, and we moved across to work in Glasgow, she in the hospitals and me a GP,” says Malcolm.
The year was 1983 and Malcolm was sent to Easterhouse, then one of the most deprived parts not just of Glasgow, but of the UK.
“They were lovely folks in a terrible situation. It was years before they sorted out the housing,” he says, of the run-down tenement buildings housing most of his patients. “I felt an increasing unhappiness with urban life.”
It’s a feeling that will chime with many struggling with the constraints of city living in the pandemic.
Malcolm, 63, was also dissatisfied with the bureaucratic nature of much city-based GP work in the constant struggle to get his patients the care and housing they needed.
“I couldn’t do anything about it,” he says. “I signed up to be a doctor, not a letter writer.”
Malcolm and Maggie moved to the city’s affluent West End but it didn’t help, so they resolved to find a rural doctor’s practice – not realising that their decision would take them on an odyssey that continues to this day, via many wild and wonderful adventures.
Maggie is from Bute and Malcolm grew up in the Scottish borders and they wanted their four sons, Martin, Matthew, Michael and Murray, aged six to one, to have space to play and grow. Not a couple to do things by half, they decided to move not just to somewhere rural. No, they wanted to live on an island, 350 miles away, in the middle of the North Sea.
Not that Malcolm had even visited an island before he met Maggie at medical college in Edinburgh.
“I hated islands,” he says laughing. “I came across to Bute to see Maggie and her family one weekend. I’d never been in a boat going across the ocean. Maggie of course laughed at me, saying, ‘We’re only crossing The Clyde, not the ocean’.”
Malcolm finally got a job on Eday, a 10-square-mile smidge of land on the edge of the Orkneys. Just him, a tatty surgery with a dilapidated house attached and 125 proud islanders, vastly outnumbered by the resident wildlife population.
And at times they all – human and animal – relied on him for all their medical care.
The Alexanders exchanged city life for exhilarating isolation – working alone on an island with only a tenuous plane link to mainland Britain in an emergency.
The boys would go to a school with eight pupils instead of 300. There was just one shop, and supplies would arrive once a week by boat. Malcolm has written a book, Close To Where The Heart Gives Out, about their extraordinary experience 30 years ago on Eday – where their family unit swelled to three geese, six ducks, a rabbit, a guinea pig and a dog, and a year later a little sister for the boys, Megan.
After actually getting there – a journey that takes a day – the family had to get the hang of life on a tiny, sparselypopulated island where everyone had several jobs and knew everyone else’s business. “We settled in quite quickly,” says Malcolm. “I grew to love the isolation of it, the dark skies.
“Many people have seen the Merry Dancers – the Northern Lights. Few, very few, have heard the electric beat of the solar winds. The sound of the Merry Dancers. That became enough compensation quite quickly.”
But while the beauty of the landscape was in no doubt, Malcolm was petrified by the weight of the responsibility on his shoulders.
“I dreaded going out on a call. I drove myself mad worrying about what they might have. It is a real anxiety, true for a lot of doctors – even in big cities. What if you’re the first person on the scene, as it were, and you don’t know how to start?”
Not only was Malcolm the first medical person on the scene – he was the only medical person on the scene by quite some distance: the buck stopped with him. “At first